Field Notes––

Singing On The Nest

By Dottie Evans

If nicknames betoken affection, then the American goldfinch is truly beloved.

Iowa, New Jersey, and Washington have all claimed Carduelis tristus as “their” state bird, but the goldfinch really belongs to all of us. Its year-round range extends from Southern Canada to Mexico and across most of the continental United States.

In folklore, the American goldfinch has been called yellow bird, wild canary, thistle bird, lettuce bird, salad bird, and even beet bird. These vegetable and salad course names undoubtedly grew out of its preference for eating seeds from so many sources –– weeds and grasses, herbs and flowers.

Simply hang out a mesh bag filled with Nyger (thistle) seed and see how long it takes for the goldfinches, who are constantly foraging in the fields and roadsides and checking out the neighborhood gardens, to find it. Within hours, a full complement of sunny yellow birds with black wings and caps will be hanging right-side-up and upside-down from your feeder, all busily eating. Several more are lined up on the clothesline waiting for a place to open up.

Summer or winter, thistle seed is what goldfinches love best. They will happily dine on anything else the untidy gardener has left uncut and untrimmed. Sunflower, coreopsis, coneflower –– if it goes to seed, the goldfinches find it and are grateful you didn’t deadhead or haul away those spent blooms.

Nothing enlivens the dull winter landscape like a flock of goldfinches dressed in their off-season garb of olive gray, flocking to a stand of Queen Anne’s lace poking out of the snow. Those dried up stalks might be bent and broken, but the curled-up flower heads contain food enough to stoke a tiny bird’s furnace fires against the coldest night.

Pay attention and you might hear goldfinches before you see them. Their twittering, chirping calls are uttered on the wing. They also sing while they are perched nearby a food source and while sitting on the nest. This last observation seems preposterous considering that most birds sitting on eggs try not to draw attention to themselves. I wouldn’t bring it up except that I saw it for myself one summer in Cape Cod, and I wrote it down.

It was mid-August of 1995. I was doing dishes while gazing absently out the kitchen window at a dogwood tree where I knew there was a goldfinch nest with six eggs in it. While I stood there, I realized that a twittering song was coming from that very spot and it had been going on for several minutes. The male goldfinch was nowhere in sight but when I went outside to take a closer look, there was the female sitting in the nest and singing. I’ve never forgotten it.

Which brings up another interesting fact about goldfinches. They don’t nest until the middle of summer –– much later than most other species of birds. This adaptation makes perfect sense because in August, there will be plenty of thistledown to line the nest and a full banquet of thistle seeds that goldfinch parents will consume and then regurgitate into the waiting mouths of their nestlings.

You might say that as a result of their late-nesting habits, goldfinches put all their eggs in one basket. So they tend to have lots of babies but only one brood. Necessary adaptations on an earlier theme.

What’s left to admire about goldfinches besides their gorgeous coloring and their cheerful song? How about the distinctive way they fly. None other than John James Audubon described it in 1824 as he made his way up the nearly completed Erie Canal and paused to sketch “the beautiful falls of the Genesee River.”

In the month of August, I have met more of these pretty birds in the course of a day’s walk than anywhere else; and whenever a thistle was to be seen along either bank of the New York canal, it was ornamented with one or more Goldfinches. They tear up the down and withered petals of the ripening flowers with ease, leaning downwards upon them, eat off the seed, and allow the down to float in the air. The remarkable plumage of the male, as well as its song, are at this season very agreeable.

The flight of the American goldfinch is performed in deep curved lines, alternately rising and falling, after each propelling motion of the wings. It scarcely ever describes one of these curves without uttering two or three notes whilst ascending.