The Gold in my Garden

The wildflowers in the backyard are stunningly colorful right now: red, yellows of various sorts, purple, pink, lavender, greens of all sorts. Even the weeds are pretty. The colors or the smells or both are attracting a wide variety of insects and birds, especially one. Do you see him peering out between the coneflowers? (Hint: he's bright yellow and black). Yup, it's the American Goldfinch, also known as the Eastern Goldfinch or Wild Canary.

This is the breeding plumage of the male. He will drop these colorful feathers to look much more like the drabber and far less yellow female during the winter, when Goldfinches get together in large flocks to scour the countryside for seeds. But you can still recognize them by their striking black and white wing patches. You can tell how small these little finches are by comparing him with the size of the coneflower. They only weigh about 12-15 grams (roughly the equivalent of a McDonald's ketchup package).



After feasting on the seeds just beginning to form in the Blazing Star outside my kitchen windows, the Goldfinches have moved on to the very tall Cup Plant on the border of the wildflower garden. They tug and pull at the innards of those flowers like they are trying to dismember them, and bend the flowers by hanging upside down on the ends of the stems to reach inside.

The camera is almost unable to distinguish their yellow color from that of the flowers.

Life is great for Goldfinches now, but in a couple of months when the temperatures dip below freezing and the daylight decreases to a bare 8 hr per day, Goldfinches will remain in MN, unlike many of our summer bird species. Even though they are quite small, Goldfinches are veritable furnaces of heat production. They can maintain a warm and constant body temperature, even at -40 F overnight! That's the advantage of eating seeds, which provide a fat and protein-rich diet. Even nuthatches and chickadees, which eat insects during the summer, switch to eating seeds at your bird feeders during the winter. By foraging in large flocks during the winter, Goldfinches take advantage of the "many eyes" strategy to find new food sources while watching out for potential predators.