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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bombycilla" data-source="post: 1601195" data-attributes="member: 72567">I can respect the 'diagnosability' issue birders face with Loxia. However, whilst Common and Scottish Crossbills may be potentially confused (visually) where they occur together, Parrot is quite distinct.Scottish calls are distinctive and can learned by anyone who can be bothered to spend the time - their flight calls have an extra component (which you hear) and their excitement calls sound nothing like those of Parrot Crossbill and can only really be confused with EcE ( glip) Common Calls ( whose own flight calls sound nothing like Scottish flight calls). In the hand identification whilst useful as a diagnosing tool for crossbills is also potentially fraught with difficulties as there is often some natural variation within a population ( which may overlap with another type) and as such outliers at both extremes may be difficult to classify, or may be classified wrongly on this method alone. An example of this would be a male Crossbill with bill depth 12.3mm in NE Scotland - it could be a big Scottish or small Parrot. Then, the use of its release call may become more significant. But then do you classify on this factor alone...... ? !</blockquote>