American goldfinches signal a hopeful newyear, thankfully
On a morning walk, when the temperature was 36 degrees under a clear blue sky, I heard a bird’s clear, high-pitched call that sounded like tinkling crystal.
The bird’s call had me stumped, and I usually know what birds are making what sounds without thinking. But this bird made me stop and think.
I couldn’t see the bird — it was perched somewhere high in a neighbor’s backyard tree, and I don’t go traipsing in somebody’s yard to find a bird. So I quickly scanned the files in my brain’s auditory memory.
And there it was, the call of an American goldfinch, sounding like “pa-chick-a-ree” uttered in quick short notes. How embarrassing not to have recognized it at first, like not knowing the voice of an old friend.
Goldfinches don’t utter that call very often when they’re here for the winter. They do utter high-pitched chattering calls, sounding like “sweee-sweeee.”
Now the birds have descended on my backyard as if to ring in the new year with their chattering sounds. While they cannot presage human events, goldfinches do seem to reassure an end to a brutal year with promis
es of a providential new year.
Yet goldfinches, in dreary winter plumage of lackluster olive-brown, don’t look like they could beacon brighter days. But as spring approaches, the birds will molt their body feathers into a sunny yellow hue, as though signaling an end to bleakness.
The birds are among a few songbirds that undergo two feather molts a year, discarding the dull winter plumes for fresh spring plumes. Their
wings and tails don’t molt but sharpen from a matte black to a satiny finish.
Springtime males will sport beaming plumage of lemon-yellow with a black fore crown. Females, ever the ones left out for florid attire, will become yellowish-brown. Yet female songbirds must remain inconspicuous to predators as they lay eggs in the nest.
Don’t look for nesting goldfinches here. They’ll instead return to breeding grounds in southern Canada and across the midcontinental U.S.
Goldfinch flocks migrate here to feast on seeds not
readily available on breeding grounds during winter. They go for the wild seeds in forests and parks before descending on neighborhood yards.
They also forage in disparate roving flocks, with each flock devouring seeds in different backyards every day. Not that we’d care, as long as they’re chittering about a Happy New Year.