| from the September 6, 2009 Newsletter, issued from the
Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon: A GOOD TIME FOR FINCHES Here at the dry season's end the landscape mellows into endless ripenings of seed and fruit. In rural areas along roads and field edges, grasses offer a bounty for grain eaters. Everywhere elegant grass inflorescences nod in breezes, holding aloft tiny, hard grains enfolded in dry, dun-colored chaff, the neat glumes, lemmas and paleas of grass flowers. It's a good time for small songbirds who land among the flimsy inflorescences and eat the grains, spending much time grinding their beaks back and forth husking off the chaff and mashing the seeds. No bird group is more at home inside a grass inflorescence than the Finch Family, and in North America maybe the best-known and most beloved finches are the bright yellow and black goldfinches, the American Goldfinch distributed from coast-to-coast, and the Lesser Goldfinch of the west and south-central states. During this week's backpacking hike for the first 15 miles I walked along roads through the valley before climbing into mountains and following Forest Service logging roads back home. Again and again small flocks of Lesser Goldfinches, CARDUELIS PSALTRIA, turned up wherever grasses had gone unmowed, and in blackberry thickets. There's so much for them to eat that often long rows of them perched basking on power lines above their meals. Two perching on a line are shown above. The mature male on the right calls his thin, high-pitched teeeyooo as the juvenile on the left seems to be rolling his eyes like any good adolescent. Of course that's grossly anthropomorphic, so you can interpret the image yourself. Lesser Goldfinches are so named because they're half an inch (1+ cm) smaller than American Goldfinches, who are small birds to begin with. You can distinguish the male Lesser in the picture from a mature male American Goldfinch because the black on the latter's head is restricted to the forehead, while the Lesser's blackness continues over the crown and down the back. Lesser Goldfinches are common in upland central Mexico, too, but Americans don't get that far south. Down there, male Lessers have pure black backs, while you can see that our male's nape pales to a greenish gray. Our pale-backed geographical variation is limited to the US far West, and northwestern Mexico. |