Tweet of the Week

not always known so. In Tudor times it was called a King Harry or Red Cap. The Anglo-Saxons, meanwhile, dubbed the bird a “thistle tweaker” – a name that stems from the ability to use its long, fine beak to feast upon the seeds of spiky ragwort, dandelion, teasel and thistle.

The goldfinch’s song is more than equivalent to its handsome livery. The bird chirrups a long, liquid flow of twit-twit tweets, as delicate as raindrops pattering off a tin roof.

Needless to say, such beauty has inspired many down the ages.

The 17th century Dutch artist Carel Fabritius painted a lavish portrait of the bird, which centuries later proved the inspiration for Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning literary bestseller,

The English Romantic poet John Keats also wrote of his joy watching and listening to goldfinches in his 1884 work, “I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill”. Keats took unashamed delight in their “yellow flutterings” and “feathers sleek”.

But by the late 19th century, the goldfinch’s beauty had proved its undoing. The trade in trapping and selling the birds to adorn cages in Victorian homes resulted in it being declared an endangered species.

Over recent decades, however, the goldfinch population has boomed; even as so many other British songbirds have suffered.

Much of this is thought to be the