It’s the Fourth of July. I imagine people heading out to paddle, swim, picnic, parade or barbecue while I’m indoors reading about American goldfinches and watching them at our feeders.
And ever so happy doing just that.
A male rose-breasted grosbeak and female cardinal visit the feeders for a red-white-and blue tableau. The feeders are intensely blue.
Soon, a male bluebird adds his colors.
I’m eager for a photo of a goldfinch pair to illustrate their unique nesting schedule. While downy woodpecker, cardinal, and red-breasted woodpecker youngsters are visiting the feeders, and our garage-nesting phoebes are working on brood No. 2, goldfinches have yet to begin nesting.
Why this departure from the general songbird rule?
I’ve always thought it’s about food. Goldfinches are confirmed seed eaters, able to extract adequate protein from seeds while most songbirds switch to insects for the energy-demanding job of producing and raising young.
There are more seeds in late summer. That’s how the wild world works: a species delivers its young when its preferred foods are most available. Fertility is timed to follow that cycle of food.
Most goldfinch accounts mention thistles: thistle down as nesting material, and thistle seed as a favored food, both available in late summer. Years back, when a prickly thistle grew tall in our back field, I left it for the goldfinches. Thistles now sprout here and there, offspring of that first plant, and I do my best to weed them out as thistles and bare feet are a bad match.
As I research and write, with occasional looks at the feeders for a goldfinch pair, a hairy woodpecker male feeds a youngster at the suet cake. Nuthatches come and go but their plumage doesn’t give away sex or age. Young chipping sparrows glean the ground under the feeders.
There hasn’t been a chickadee at the feeders for weeks. These winter seedeaters are prime examples of the seasonal switch to insects. Like many other birds, they favor moth caterpillars, smooth-skinned for the most part but the occasional hairy caterpillar, too. Breeding season done, they’ll become regulars at feeders again.
In September goldfinches glean seeds from garden cosmos. They prefer landing on a plant to ground-foraging, and a yardful of goldfinches bending flower stalks with their weight is one of many pleasing goldfinch sights.
I associate back-to-school days with the bright “chip-pee” notes of young goldfinches. Usually they’re tagalongs with their male parent. If the female is working on a second brood, the adult male takes full charge of feeding the first.
I read in a few accounts that the female switches partners for the second brood, but the authoritative Cornell species account delivers the hard data: “sequential polyandry characteristic of 15 percent of breeding females as strategy for producing second broods.”
It’s hard not to anthropomorphize, with sympathy for the rejected male. However, he’s fully engaged leading the first brood around, showing them the ropes, feeding them until they’re fully independent.
The male also feeds the female on the nest.
He might appreciate being supplanted.
My favorite part in the Cornell account describes selecting the nest site:
“Pairs move through suitable vegetation, examining, squatting, swiveling, and repeating movements in prospective nest sites, suggesting both sexes involved in selecting nest site. Male frequently observed to ‘fidget’ with suitable nesting materials, as if to stimulate female into building, but material invariably dropped.”
And the female builds the nest.
It’s the male’s half-hearted housekeeping “fidget” that amuses. Again the anthropomorphizing.
Post-breeding, the adults molt into their nondescript winter plumage. It’s the male’s bright bright yellow breeding plumage that earned the species State Bird status in three states, but I suspect that many people in New Jersey, Iowa and Washington don’t recognize their state bird in its winter look.
Most of “our” goldfinches push south for the winter, although some years many remain to bring pleasing life to backyard birdfeeders.
It’s the increase in backyard feeders that has led to an increase in winter goldfinch numbers. Come spring, large goldfinch flocks atwitter in the treetops are the dominate voices in the bird chorus. That chorus fades as pair bonds form soon after feather molt produces the male’s intense yellow.
I read that the energy demands of that complete spring molt might help explain why goldfinches are late nesters — along with food resources for these confirmed granivores.
I did get out of the house on the 4th. Carl and I paddled the Contoocook a bit.
A few times I heard the flight calls of goldfinches, pleasingly translated as “potato chip. . .potato chip,” notes that accompany each dip in their characteristic undulating flight.
We had the traditional 4th of July potato salad, not potato chips, the traditional first few garden peas and raspberries, and (almost) the first gin and tonic.
Summer has arrived.