All species › Passerines › Finches › Hispaniolan Crossbill
Hispaniolan Crossbill | Loxia megaplaga
Hispaniolakruisbek | Piquituerto de La Española
The Hispaniolan Crossbill is the only crossbill in the Caribbean and lives exclusively in the pine forest of Hispaniola's highest mountains, where it is called pico cruzado. With its crossed mandible tips it prises open the scales of the cones of Hispaniolan Pine Pinus occidentalis. The species probably descends from crossbills that stayed behind in the cool mountains after the last ice age and is closely related to the Two-barred Crossbill of North America and Eurasia.
Voice
The call is a high, emphatic, repeated chu-chu-chu-chu, often in flight. The song is a series of trills and chirping notes.
Recording: Ross Gallardy — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
15–16 cm, stocky, with a large head, a short forked tail and a heavy bill with crossed tips. The male is dull brown with a red to reddish-orange wash on the head, nape, upper back and breast. The wings are blackish with two broad white wing bars. The female is dull brown with a yellow rump, a yellow wash on the upper breast and fine brown streaks across the whole breast. Juveniles resemble the female but are browner and more heavily streaked.
Confusion species
On Hispaniola identified by the crossed bill and white wing bars. Females and juveniles of Antillean Siskin Spinus dominicensis, which live in the same pine forest, are much smaller, with a pointed bill and yellow patches in the wing and tail.
Habitat
Pine forest of Pinus occidentalis between about 540 and 2600 m. It depends on ripe cones and roams in small groups to places with a good cone crop. It breeds mainly from January to April, in loose clusters. The clutch is two or three eggs.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Endemic to Hispaniola. In the Dominican Republic in the Sierra de Bahoruco and the Cordillera Central; in Haiti in the Massif de la Selle and the Massif de la Hotte. A few sightings in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica in the 1970s are regarded as vagrants. Reports from the Bahamas are unsubstantiated.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In the Dominican Republic in the pine forest of the Sierra de Bahoruco and at Valle Nuevo in the Cordillera Central. Occurrence varies with the cone crop; groups give themselves away by their flight call and by the sound of cones being broken open and scales falling.
Conservation status
Endangered. The world population is estimated at 1000 to 2300 mature birds and is declining. The main threats are fragmentation of the pine forest by farming and logging, and large, uncontrolled forest fires.
Scientific name
Loxia megaplaga | Riley, 1916
Riley described the species in 1916 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Loxia was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Loxia comes from Ancient Greek loxos 'crosswise', after the crossed tips of the bill. According to Jobling, megaplaga is Greek, from mega 'very, great' and plagios 'oblique, crooked', presumably after the strongly crossed bill. The specimen the first description was based on came from El Río, Dominican Republic.