Dawn Chorus Birdblog: Disselfinks

It’s mid-summer – goldfinch time!  Right now, they’re at their peak wearing their most brilliant feathers, singing constantly and engaging is wild, fluttering territorial battles (as wild as you can get when you weigh half an ounce).

Adult male American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis)

(Pictures will be emerging slowly this week, as we’re at the cabin and I’m on dial-up.)

For my first 20 years of birding in San Francisco, American Goldfinches were as rare as hen’s teeth.   They like grassy, weedy areas and with SF real estate being what it is, there aren’t many grassy, weedy lots in the city.   Every year, I’d put out a thistle feeder in hopes of enticing them to my yard.  With any luck, I’d see one or two, and the golden-crown sparrows would eat most of the seed.  (There was one great year when a horde of pine siskins showed up.  They are feisty little things – wouldn’t give up their spot on the feeder even when I reached out to fill it so I had to literally shake them off.  But I digress.)  

A little over a year ago, I got a new feeder with yellow end caps and suddenly I had goldfinches.  Amazing what a difference that splash of color made, but it makes sense since goldfinch are very sociable birds year round.   Even in breeding season, they like to hang out with a small flock rather than go off into separate areas until the nesting is done.

Goldfinches are closely associated with thistle – they love the seeds, and also use thistle down to line their nests.  (Disselfink, the German name for goldfinch, means "thistle finch")  Waiting for the thistle to be ready may be the reason that they’re one of the latest nesting birds, usually not getting started on their first clutch until mid-June.  Our dry spring in California meant that many birds started breeding early, so I actually had my first juveniles showing up at the feeder last week - a week or two earlier than I might have expected them.

Juvenile American Goldfinch in really fresh plumage... lookin' sharp!

Even though that sunshine yellow is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a goldfinch, they don’t wear that brilliant plumage for too long.  Other goldfinches molt just once a year in the fall, but American Goldfinches do it twice – going to a drab beige in the fall and to the strong yellow (on the males) in the spring.  Female plumages are more similar, though they’re a bit more yellow in the summer.  Both male and female adults’ bills and legs are pinkish in the summer and darker in the winter.  They have black or blackish brown wing and tail feathers with white edging which gradually wears away over the course of a year.  Juveniles look similar to females, but their bills are dark in the summer and their flight feathers have buffy edges instead of white.

Juvenile (lower left) and adult female (upper right).  Notice the difference in bill color, and the buffy edges on the juv's feathers vs. the (somewhat worn) white edges on the adult female.

American Goldfinches have a cheerful twittering song, but it’s their contact call that I learned with this great mnemonic:  "Potato Chip" and flies with a dip.  (Hey, I’m just repeating – I didn’t come up with this on my own.)

(As I’m typing this at 5am, a Western Screech Owl has just started trilling a few feet from my porch... how’s that for a nice start to the day?)

In other bird news, it’s been heartbreaking to hear that the Basin Fire in Big Sur, which has already destroyed 20+ homes and burned about 100 square miles, has claimed at least one California Condor chick from a wild nest (one that was only discovered about three weeks ago).  The other two known wild nests in the area are threatened but it has been too dangerous to try to rescue the chicks.   Given that condors are very slow-breeding, this is a real setback.  The happier news is that eight young captive-raised condors were rescued from the holding pen where they’d been awaiting release into the wild.  The holding pen and associated facilities were destroyed, though.  If you want to show some love to Ventana Wilderness Society to help them through this tough period, I’m sure it would be appreciated.  You can find them here: http://ventanaws.org/... (they've got video of the helicopter rescue of the eight young condors, too)  

To finish on a happier note... I love when the fledglings start showing up at the feeder.  You can tell the ones who are really fresh from the nest - they'll perch on the feeder by their parents and flutter their wings to beg for food; they don't understand what all of that stuff is right in front of them.  Then they finally figure out that it's food, but still don't know how to get at it so they'll peck at the tube randomly.  Within a day or so, they've found out about the feeder ports and they're chowing down just like all the adults.