Its bill, crossed at the tips, is specialized for pulling apart pine cones and picking out the seeds. Crossbills are found in the evergreen forests of the Northern Hemisphere, as far south as NW Africa and Guatemala. Two species occur in the United States.
Males have orange to dull red plumage, with black wings.
Crossbills are not considered migratory, but they shift their breeding grounds erratically, probably in response to the availability of pine cones. Sometimes they suddenly appear in large numbers in areas where they were formerly rarely seen. They are classified in the phylum Chordata , subphylum Vertebrata, class Aves, order Passeriformes, family Fringillidae.