Goldfinches can portend hard freeze
Backyard bird feeders, woodland seeds are essential for these small, energetic birds
American goldfinches began huddling in my yard the last week of December. I should have known a hard freeze was coming.
The pixie birds had arrived in wooded parks and nearby forests by Thanksgiving, migrating from breeding grounds in the midcontinental U.S. and southern Canada. They come to feed on the woodland harvest of wild seeds that are scarce in breeding grounds in icy northern climes.
But prolonged freezing weather in our area can diminish the local wild seed crop. Perhaps sensing the imminent freezing days of the new year, the goldfinches headed to backyard bird feeders to ensure a supply of seeds.
Or maybe they had been hanging out in North Texas, where freezing weather hit before Christmas, and they quickly headed down to our neighborhoods. My mentor, the late John Tveten, always said, “When it freezes in Dallas, we get goldfinches in Houston.”
The birds arrived in my yard to cop seeds out of a large
sweetgum tree. The birds seemed to dangle on tree twigs, snatching seeds and rolling them lengthwise with their tongues before cracking the hulls with their tiny, conical beaks and swallowing the kernels.
I’ve also seen them devour seeds while dangling from tall sunflower plants at summer breeding grounds in Nova Scotia.
But Goldfinches aren’t necessarily dangling — instead they are grasping and holding twigs steady with their feet while their beaks extract seeds from seed pods.
And these energetic birds look like anything but goldfinches right now. Readers often are confused when winter flocks of goldfinches show up in their yards. “What bird is that?” they ask.
The confusion arises because, rather than sporting a springtime plumage of bright yellow, goldfinches in winter are a drab grayish-brown with dull black wings.
Males may have a tincture of yellow in the feathers and traces of black on the forehead. Females look similar, just more drab.
As winter yields to spring, goldfinches gradually molt body feathers to become the color of sunflowers. People then wonder if
wild canaries have come to their yard.
Goldfinches are among songbirds, like warblers, that undergo two molts a year: a complete feather molt in fall that covers them in lackluster plumage and a molt of head and body feathers excluding wings and tail in spring that adorns males in fulgent golden yellow.
Males also reveal a striking black skull cap and equally striking black wings marked by white bars. Females merely get a yellow cast on the underside, brown-tinted green on the topside and wan black wings.
Email Gary Clark at Texasbirder@comcast.net