Jeff & Konnor's Blog

Winter returns, and we have a crazy number of birds in the backyard today -- on every peg of all four of our feeders, on the ground by the dozens, and in the trees. This feeder was full this morning.

Speaking of birds, the most recent "What is it" photo was of the wing feathers of a goldfinch.

And speaking of goldfinches, the bright yellow goldfinch in the lower right of this picture caused us to learn something new today. There are relatively few that are this bright yellow, so we pulled out the bird guide to verify that it was really a goldfinch. It is in fact a male with its spring/summer color. The bird in the upper left is also a goldfinch. What we accidentally learned while looking this up is that the other birds in the photo are pine siskins. We've seen a lot of these this year, and we thought they were young goldfinches whose color hadn't come in fully yet. We looked through three years of photos and this seems to be the first year that we've had pine siskins. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology tells us that they are irruptive -- with irregular migratory patterns and showing up in large numbers in unpredictable locations -- just like the grosbeaks we had last spring. Cornell also gives us this quote showing we are not alone in our confusion: "When seeing Pine Siskins for the first time, they can be hard to identify. Sometimes they mix with a flock of American Goldfinches, which are similar in size, shape, and behavior, making them hard to notice unless you look closely."