The Golden Birds
Bring bright, thistle-loving beauties to your backyard.
Seeing a vibrant yellow American goldfinch at a feeder is enough to make any birder’s heart skip a beat. Among the muted plumage of pine siskins, chickadees and sparrows, these bright beauties are a shock to the system.
“They are very striking,” says Scott Gremel, a wildlife biologist at Washington’s Olympic National Park. “They look like tropical birds.”
Male and female goldfinches appear markedly different during breeding season, when males molt into bright yellow body feathers with black wings and cap and an orange bill. Juveniles and females are less colorful year-round. In winter, males have a dark bill and dull yellow body feathers, and look more like the females.
These feathered friends mainly eat seeds, cracking them open with their short bills. Favorite seeds include Njyer, thistle, black oil sunflower, alder and aster, among others. They also snack on buds, sap, the bark of young twigs, and occasionally insects.
To attract them to your yard, plant native thistles or milkweed. While goldfinches sometimes eat from the ground, they’re adapted to pluck seeds from swaying flower heads and feeders.
Use tube feeders with short perches to encourage goldfinches and to discourage sparrows. Sock feeders also dispense tiny thistle seeds and are attractive to finches, pine siskins and chickadees.
American goldfinches’ breeding range includes southern Canada all the way to northern Georgia and coastal California. In winter, they vacate the northern edge of this range, and flocks appear south to Florida and the Mexican border.
Goldfinches aren’t under threat. Partners in Flight, a conservation organization, estimates a breeding population of 42 million. Found in cities and agricultural areas, “they are a species that has done well with human settlement,” Scott says.
These active birds have bouncy, aerobatic flight patterns. They pair off during breeding season, but other times of the year, they may fly in flocks of 50 to 100. “If you see a weedy field full of thistle, sometimes there will be a huge flock of goldfinches,” Scott says.
The in-flight call of the goldfinch sounds like po-ta-to-chip. Its other songs and calls are random series of warbles and twitters that last a few seconds, while its courtship call is a sharp tee-yee with a burst of song afterward.
After couples pair up and select a nest site in a bush or shrub—not too high off the ground—females build an open cup nest. It’s woven with plant fibers and rootlets. The foundation is supported by spider silk, and the inside is lined with fluffy material taken from seed heads.
Most fledglings leave the nest 11 to 17 days after hatching, so by late summer you may see olive-colored youngsters at your feeders.