麻豆社

Pine trees, fir trees, conifers, call them what you will, but let鈥檚 face it they do look very much the same. But they鈥檙e not. There are several different species here in Kielder and they all have a couple of things in common. First of all, they all have needles - some of them soft, some of them hard - but all designed to retain moisture so that the tree can remain evergreen. And the other thing they have in common is cones. The cones are also different shapes and different sizes because they come from different trees. But because they are different trees, they fruit at different times, which in a nutshell means there is always food available for creatures that can get at it. It鈥檚 not difficult when the cone is open and the seeds just fall out, or even from a loose one, but how on Earth do you get into a solid cone? Bill Oddie can鈥檛 do it. He might be able to snap it if he had super strength. The answer is you need a specially adapted eating utensil. And some birds have exactly that. Siskins are tiny little birds with tiny little pointy beaks. Bill Oddie is sure they couldn鈥檛 prise open an unripe pine cone, but they can get at the seeds when the cone itself has opened. The chaffinch's beak isn't quite up to it either. This is the one with the quintessential perfect cone-opening implement stuck on its face - the crossbill. Its beak is like a pair of secateurs which can get right in the cone, not only open it but sort of twist round and get a veritable shower of cone seeds out. Although legend hath it that that bill was not actually originally designed for opening seeds: it was straight like a normal beak and the crossbill saw our Lord crucified and tried to pull out the nails and in the process its beak got crossed. And it also got spurted with Jesus鈥檚 blood, hence the red breast, which tells us that if that story is true it was at least a male crossbill that had a go. In a good year there can be a staggering 100,000 pairs of crossbills in Kielder.