Pine siskin a year-round NM resident
The pine siskin is a small songbird that is brownish in color, with a finely streaked breast, yellow markings on its wings and tail and a short, pointed beak. They have a widespread range and are a year round resident in much of New Mexico. The pine siskin is a bird that often goes unnoticed. This is because they are nomadic and considered an irruptive species, meaning they have unpredictable movements.
Pine siskins can be found in a variety of habitat such as open fields, urban backyards and woodlands. They travel in tight flocks making twittering calls as they search for food. Unlike many other finch family birds, pine siskins have difficulty cracking larger, heavier shelled seeds. Their diet consists of a variety of small seeds from pine cones, wild thistle plants and native grasses. Pine siskins are easily attracted to backyard bird feeders and are often seen flocking with similar-sized lesser goldfinches.
Pine siskins also get through extremely cold winter nights by increasing their metabolic rate up to five times their normal rate for several hours. During spring and summer nesting season, the female will insulate the nestlings from the cold by remaining on the nest continuously while the male siskin feeds her.
Bird banding has been an effective tool in tracking migrating bird movements. The pine siskins’ unpredictable and erratic movements however, make them difficult to track. Of 675,000 banded pine siskins from 1960 to 2011, fewer than 2,000 were later found. In the same period, 5 million geese were banded and about 1.25 million were recovered.
Pine siskins live throughout most of our state, so listen for their wheezy, twittering calls to alert you to their presence.