"From mid-January to mid-April 1935 i used to be off on my dilapidated bicycle, yet how diverse Speyside used to be from Breckland. In overdue February many crossbills have been nonetheless in flocks; I needed to stroll and cycle for plenty of miles prior to discovering my first nest within the final week of March, whilst I situated a small breeding staff in a plantation of previous pines on the subject of a keeper's cottage. Thenceforward, until eventually 1942, I the crossbills and slowly started to comprehend a bit approximately them. firstly every thing was once gloriously new. I watched my crossbills mating and stumbled on how subtly a wintry weather flock replaced to a mating occasion and from a mating social gathering to mated teams. I studied styles of territory and dispersion and watched how hens outfitted their nests. I sat lower than bushes and that i climbed to nests. I watched hens brooding and observed cocks feeding them. One chicken pitched on my arms and allowed me to trap her. I nonetheless vividly bear in mind the pointy resiny odor of her physique. I observed pairs rear their younger and them and their broods throughout the wooded area. quickly my notebooks have been complete, yet this was once simply the beginning." That extract from the book's first bankruptcy describes how the writer started his research of the Scottish pine-feeding crossbills, having spotted prior that the calls of crossbills in Rothiemurchus woodland have been assorted from these of the spruce-feeding universal crossbills he had identified within the English Breckland. From this examine and a quest for the real identification of the Speyside crossbills has emerged that every one too infrequent e-book, a piece of scholarship and examine that's thoroughly readable, during which the author's get pleasure from his research topic turns into the reader's, too.