When I was a little kid, I didn’t know many birds. I could recognize a robin or a house sparrow. When I was about eight years old and staying on my grandparents’ farm, I knew what pigeons looked like. I was even allowed to shoot them with a .410 shotgun. They were very good to eat, as I recall. These were grain-fed farm pigeons, not city pigeons raised on pizza scraps and leftover french fries.
Now I know them as American goldfinches, and I’m supposed to think of them as nothing special. They are common birds. They nest in the city and in most every forest preserve and in any patch of trees in rural Illinois. They are more common in summer, though you can find them year-round.
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The short, conical beak marks the American goldfinch as a seedeater, although they are known to eat small insects, and especially insect larvae and eggs. Like many other seedeaters, they are gregarious. They live in flocks all year except for the breeding season, and even then their territorial behavior is limited. Males will drive other males away from their nests, and females will treat other females the same way. But once the nest has been built and the eggs laid, their aggressiveness declines rapidly.
There are six finches of the genus Carduelis in North America. The pine siskin is mainly a North Woods bird that we see here in winter. Common and hoary redpolls nest up on the tundra but move south in winter. We see the common here most every winter, but the hoary gets this far south only rarely.
Native American songbirds can no longer be legally kept as cage birds, but Carduelis finches from elsewhere in the world are major articles of trade in the pet business. Some of them are suffering for their singing ability. In Costa Rica the yellow-bellied siskin and the lesser goldfinch have both been seriously reduced by trappers for the pet trade.
