Goldfinches
Apparently, I don’t know a damned thing about goldfinches. This despite the fact that goldfinches and I go way back.
In Houston, two yards down from my small, private nature preserve, was a glorious and enormous American Elm. This was once a ubiquitous street tree. Elms shaded our growing country. And then they all died. Dutch elm disease reached the US in 1928 and pretty much wiped out the elms.
Perhaps Houston was spared as the blight moved from New England outward. For whatever reason, this tree survived and it was huge. So huge that it’s canopy shaded three yards.
The reason I am talking about a tree in another state that has been dead for years is that goldfinches love elm seeds. And in the early spring, as this elm set its seeds, sparkling clouds of goldfinches would arrive and stay for a month or more.
I cannot tell you how much I looked forward to that month. But, when the ancient tree started dropping huge limbs onto houses, the tree’s custodians decided to take it down and I never had goldfinches again. Until now.
At my new house in New Hampshire, I put up a feeder and despite the fact that I did not stock it with elm seeds or niger thistle (what I fed them in Houston), they arrived in droves.
Until they disappeared. But that’s jumping ahead.
First, in case you haven’t been properly introduced to a goldfinch, they are adorable and plentiful and they move in flocks.
If you live east of the Rockies, you probably have American Goldfinches very nearby. Once you cross the Rockies, there are other goldfinches that look quite a bit like the ones we have in both New Hampshire and in Texas.
Goldfinches are one of those birds where the boys are very snappy dressers and the girls kind of fade into the background. In breeding plumage, male goldfinches are the color of canaries, with a striking black forehead and black wings complete with white wing bars. At least that’s what they look like for a few months.
Goldfinches look different depending on when you see them. And this brings us to up the sort of topic I try to steer clear of in this blog, molting. Molting is technical and involves knowing the names of individual feathers. I will spare you this. But the basic outline is that birds’ feathers wear out and have to be replaced every year.
The process of replacing feathers is called molting. All birds molt, usually soon after breeding season. For most birds, that’s it. You’ve molted. But some species of birds, almost always the males, can change into dramatically different plumage at breeding time. Male goldfinches do this. They go through a second molt. After breeding season, they molt and replace all their feathers. In the early spring, they molt again, but only their body and head feathers, not the wings or tail.
The goldfinches I had in Houston in March, arrived in their winter plumages but did their pre-breeding molt in Texas and by the time they left, there were canary yellow males and dull olive females.
This is a lot of information that’s not terribly interesting unless you are yourself a goldfinch, but because goldfinches do all this shifting around, I found out that they are just a whole lot more complicated than I knew.
For example, when I first put out my tube feeder with four perches, every perch was occupied by a male goldfinch in stunning breeding attire. I didn’t know where the girls were at first because I kept expecting them to arrive on a perch. They were all over the ground. That dull plumage is great for camouflage.
This raised my first question. Were the boys just brutes (they are fractionally larger than the girls), or were they so brightly colored, they dared not feed on the ground? I think it’s the latter. During all my time watching them, I almost never saw a male goldfinch grabbing the seeds that fell out of the feeder and collected on the ground.
This is probably why they change out of fancy dress when breeding is over. It is risky to be that visible and if the ladies aren’t interested, why bother?
A digression
A digression about goldfinch relationships. Goldfinches usually have only one brood a season, but if the brood hatches early enough, the female goldfinch will go off, leaving dad in charge of the nestlings, and have another family with another male. It’s a pretty good system for maximizing number of offspring within the species and it makes me respect the boys even more. Not only do they take the risk of becoming a target, they also are willing to become a single parent so their mate can have even more kids with someone else. What great guys!
I have spent months enjoying the show and meant to take a few photos.
But about two weeks ago, the boys disappeared. All at once. I had been full of them, in full breeding plumage, and then there were none. The finches crowding my feeder and filling the perches were suddenly all olive drab, either females or juveniles.
I suspect the boys migrated south. I know from being on the receiving end of a migration, that the males often arrive weeks before the females and juveniles.
So, I thought I would write about that since I missed photographing the beautiful guys before they left. Except Monday, the day I planned to finally take a few photos, there were no goldfinches at all. For the past two months, they were emptying a feeder full of seedless sunflower seeds every two days. And then nothing.
Yesterday, I had goldfinches again. But apparently all males and all in mid-molt.
This is a completely different population of birds. There about 20 of them and they flock together. The original feeder flock were so accustomed to the feeder that you practically had to shoo them away to refill it. This bunch is flighty and they visit only once an hour or so. They do not simply stay all day and chow down like the last group. That’s another reason I think that group migrated. They ate like they were getting ready for a long journey.
Not all goldfinches migrate. There are year-round populations of goldfinches in New Hampshire. But many birds do migrate. I think my original flock went south, first the boys and a few weeks later the juveniles and girls. I think it was a migration rather than a simple filtering south because both populations disappeared all at once a few weeks apart. And they disappeared over night. Birds migrate at night and often in a flock.
Now, a new flock of goldfinches has arrived. They are all males in mid molt. I suspect they are migrating from somewhere else and this is a way station. Or, perhaps this is their final destination.
If you recall, I began this by saying that I apparently know nothing about goldfinches.
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