Spinus tristis
Bird · Finch · Late NesterA goldfinch rarely flies in a straight line. It bounds across the open field in long, looping dips, folding its wings shut at the bottom of each rise and calling a bright "po-ta-to-chip" on the way down. The whole flight reads like a yellow spark skipping over the weeds.
Almost alone among our songbirds, this is a near-total vegetarian. It cracks small seeds from thistles, asters, and sunflowers, clinging sideways to a swaying seedhead to work them loose, and it raises its young on the same seed paste rather than the usual diet of insects.
That seed habit also sets its calendar. While most birds finish breeding by June, the goldfinch waits for high summer, when thistle and milkweed go to seed. Then it lines its tight little nest cup with the silvery down those same plants release. Food and nest material ripen on the same week, and the bird is built to wait for both.
A breeding male is bright lemon yellow with a small jet-black cap set forward on the forehead and black wings crossed by white bars. Females are a softer olive-yellow and wear no cap.
The bill is small, conical, and pale pinkish-orange: a precise tool for splitting seeds. On a yellow finch east or west, that stubby bright bill rules out the warblers it is often confused with.
Watch for a deeply undulating flight, a rise-and-fall like a line of low hills. On each dip it gives a cheerful "po-ta-to-chip," a call you can learn in an afternoon and use to find them overhead.
Goldfinches feed like acrobats, hanging sideways and even upside down on thistle and sunflower heads to pull seeds straight from the bloom. Few backyard birds work a seedhead so nimbly.
From late June into September, goldfinches are at their brightest and busiest across most of North America. Look in weedy, sunlit openings where seed plants stand tall: old fields, meadow edges, roadsides, and gardens left a little wild. They come readily to feeders too, so a tube or sock of nyjer (thistle) seed is the surest way to bring them close. Listen first for the canary-like song, then scan the tops of the weeds for the bouncing yellow flight.
The Brown-headed Cowbird survives by laying its eggs in other birds' nests and leaving the hosts to raise its chicks. But a cowbird nestling needs a protein-rich diet of insects, and a goldfinch feeds its young nothing but seeds. A cowbird hatched in a goldfinch nest rarely lasts its first few days. The goldfinch's strict vegetarianism turns out to be one of the best anti-parasite defenses a songbird has.
Photinus pyralis
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