I have been known to praise birds for their plainness. If you read my accounts of birds like titmice and towhees, you might get the impression that I consider the lack of color and limited musical talent to be distinct virtues in themselves. I can’t deny having thrown around phrases like “ephemeral peacockery” in reference to the behavior of their more superficially attractive rivals.
The truth, of course, is that I praise all birds. The truth, of course, is that people, myself included, love birds for those very acts of peacockery, those seemingly gratuitous displays of color and music. Have I seemed dismissive of external displays? Have I seemed to apply Emerson’s characterization of the mass of men who
accumulate appearances, because the substance is not
willy-nilly to all the lovely flocking songsters in my enthusiasm for towhees and titmice, the brown and gray? I didn’t mean it. Because the truth is that for all birds, appearances, broadly considered, are their substance. Bright colors, beautiful songs, the mix of tolerance and competition that allows for social lives beyond that of the hermits and nations of two—these things are not mere appearances that paper over an underlying lack of substance. They are a different way of being, and a perfectly coherent one. Emerson goes on:
The object of the man… is to make daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that on what point soever of his doing your eye falls it shall report truly of his character… Now he is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse; there are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled, detecting many unlike tendencies and a life not yet at one.
– “Spiritual Laws”
Some birds are bright as sunlight, chatter and sing in endless conversation and competition. They do not do this in affectation, but as the natural and homogeneous manifestation of their inner character. And if one bird of California stands for color, song, and manifest sociability, it is that little yellow bird the modern books miscall the lesser goldfinch.
Miscall, because this bird is “lesser” in nothing but that insignificant comparative of size. I’m here to enact my promised campaign to strike that nonsensical and desiccated term from our avian roster. I will admit adjectives only in the superlative degree: this is the most tolerant and agreeable, the most unfailingly brilliant, and the most skillful singer of all our everyday birds.
Their appearance is their substance, and the daylight shines through both.
The fruit of agreeableness is overflowing abundance
Let me start with the trait that in some ways underlies the extreme developments of song and color that we see in this finch: their high degree of sociability.
And when you look at both, a fair case can be made that the finches are the most social of our region’s songbirds. As with numerous species, they forsake family groups and defended territories once nesting is complete, instead gathering into large flocks that aid each other in finding food and diminishing dangers. Such winter flocking is not uncommon, though finch flocks are larger than most in the songbird world, sometimes numbering in the hundreds.
More unusually, goldfinches are also quite tolerant of unrelated birds during nesting. Should some pushy neighbor try to intrude upon his wife sitting on the nest, sure, a male may get a little irate. But he’s not going to let the needs of nesting drive all amiability from his mind, twenty-four hours a day. Neighbors are welcome to be neighbors, to build their nests in adjacent trees or even branches, and to join him at the local feeding station, where they can form a mini flock of spring that garners some of the benefits of the bigger winter flocks. Anyone with a birdfeeder can attest to this. Try to find a cozy club of unrelated chickadees, titmice, towhees, nuthatches, or wrens at your feeders in May. They may look cute, but most springtime birds are not friendly when it comes to strangers of their own species.
This is a first and most basic sense in which to pause and appreciate this easily overlooked trait: goldfinches are friendlier than most birds. They are consistently social, to use the accepted scientific term. But I’m not afraid to use language shaded with some interpretative commentary, so I’d suggest that you also consider the applicability of words like friendly, gentle, agreeable, and trusting. Where exactly you draw the line to curtail the connotations of character within the bounds of scientific rectitude is up to you, but I think it is both fair and valuable to recognize that a higher degree of abstract “social tendency” translates itself into actual behavior as a reduced inclination to fight, chase, and otherwise be overwhelmed by tension and aggression. Sociability isn’t just an externally deduced trait, but the name we give to the underlying feelings that occupy the hours of each goldfinch’s inner life.
A person’s character is, and can be, nothing else but the total result of his habits of thought. A person is benevolent because he habitually thinks benevolently.
– Arnold Bennett, The Human Machine
Every time a male wren meets another male wren, he feels an irresistible imperative to sing, buzz, or chase to drive that aggravating presence from his sight. Goldfinches are relatively unafflicted by that compulsion and therefore live daily lives that are very different. There is no clean line separating manifested behavior and underlying biology. Why are there far more 25-year old men in our prisons than 70-year old women? There are, of course, numerous social, cultural, and legal factors that influence this question, but there are few sociologists who would deny a biological component. Now take that difference in hormonal response to the world and quadruple it: you’ve gone from a wren to a goldfinch.
Aggression and violence are down, trust and agreeability are up. We still occasionally refer to humans tamed by civilization as ladies and gentlemen. These are gentle birds, and there is a pleasure in their relaxed and peaceable temperaments.
The second benefit of social toleration is one with which humans should be quite familiar: it enables abundance. Titmice and towhees are fairly widely-occurring birds in coastal California, by no means rare. But they space themselves out and thereby limit their numbers: two here, two down the street, two on the next street over. Linnets and goldfinches share the land, share abundant food sources, and like us can therefore maintain enormous overall populations, such that you can’t walk down the street without seeing people and hearing finches.
This works unusually well for goldfinches because they have adapted modes of nesting and feeding that are not inherently subject to strong natural limits within an appropriate environment. Around here, almost any site outside of dense forest will comfortably sustain a few dozen finches. Any tree will hold a little cup nest. Their chief foods are the seeds of thistles and other “weedy” plants. In spring, they augment their diet with a smattering of spring buds, fresh greens, and small insects, but overall goldfinches focus intensely on tiny seeds that are extremely abundant, but require their uniquely precise beaks to efficiently pluck, shell, and consume.
“In the breeding season they disperse almost everywhere,” David Lukas sums up in Bay Area Birds. In a particularly wonderful Dawsonism, the great man reacts to the admission of a learned Professor Cooper, author of an Ornithology of California, that he “had not met with the nests” of our most abundant goldfinch.
Not met with them! Shades of Audubon! Where were your eyes? For if there is one virtue which the Green-backed Goldfinch possesses above another, it is that of propagating.
– William Leon Dawson, The Birds of California
This then, is the second and by no means negligible attraction of goldfinches’ relentless amiability: our lives are absolutely overflowing with those cheerful, friendly flocks.
A sound digression: the greenback calls
There are of course, other knock-on effects of social living. There’s a great deal of conversation, for one thing. I try not to let a chance go by to at least introduce the basic sounds of a bird, familiarity with which is an essential prerequisite to any real friendliness worthy of the name. For goldfinches, there are two calls of daily life you should know.
Tee-yee: The first is a high, usually sinking whistle which is universally considered to have a plaintive tone. This is classed as a social/mild alarm call, given in various degrees of disquiet, from general inquiry as to the status of a partner to moderate anxiety. (They have more intense alarm calls which you will hear less often.) Or as Mr. Ex-Clapper Rail put it with fine old 19th century flavor:
The note of this bird is remarkable for its power and very sad tone. The ordinary note is a plaintive, mellow, whistling call, impossible to describe, and so inflected as to produce a very mournful effect.
– Ridgway, History of North American Birds, 1874
Flight Call: Then they have a flight, or contact, call, given regularly upon taking off and intermittently in flight, as well as in other close proximity contact situations. American goldfinches have a somewhat similar one, often rendered as “per-chick-o-ree” or “po-ta-to-chip”. In greenbacks, it’s a series of two to seven short staccato notes with a rather harsh and grating tone (“jarring like breaking glass,” says Hoffman), but at a soft and modest volume that can’t really hurt your ears (“gentle deprecating calls,” says Florence Merriam Bailey, with no real contradiction).
The gold that never fades
Agreeable manners are therefore one key component of the goldfinch life. When I discussed the life histories of our less sociable birds, a common trait repeatedly resurfaced: loners or those in long-term relationships have a reduced need for the superficial finery of fancy plumage. The camouflage value of discrete coloration usually wins out in evolutionary advantage. Here is one of the most brilliant examples of the natural inverse: social birds that establish new pair bonds each spring often value bright colors as a way of demonstrating male health to potential mates.
This is accordingly seen in varying degrees among all of the cardueline finches. They all have some bright colors, whether the all-over magnificence of the goldfinches and the red linnets, or the more selective highlights of siskins and redpolls. When it comes to the goldfinches, even Californians sometimes fall into the erroneous conception that our other species, the American goldfinch, is the pinnacle of goldness, the most magnificently yellow, and that this is another area beyond size in which our little western variant deserves that dismissive appellation of “lesser.”
I disagree. The American goldfinch is the pinnacle of goldness for some four months, when the males conduct a pre-breeding (in addition to the typical post-breeding) molt and don their brightest finery, their black caps, and even transform their dull feet and beaks to a brighter orange. Overall, it’s a rather garish neon. Some people go in for that.
But what do they do as early as July? They start to shed that unnatural and unsustainable brilliance. It’s not safe to be that bright: someone will eat you. The “lesser” goldfinches, in contrast, maintain their bright yellows all year round. And this is still a bright yellow, make no mistake, offset in males by a crisp black cap, crisp black wings, and crisp white wing patches. If you see a bright yellow goldfinch in November, and stop and stare at that somehow forgotten luminescence, remember to also stop and mentally repudiate any notion of lesserness. Those merely bigger goldfinches are now dull and anonymous. Goldfinches? They hardly deserve the name for two thirds of the year.
This bright yellow plumage and contrasting points of black and white are traits of the male. That’s because these are features of sexual display, adaptations that demonstrate health, fitness, and mate value. They have black caps and wings: they are males. They are bright yellow, and yet survive and thrive despite the increased visibility to predators: they are survivors. They undertake special sky dances (or “flight displays” if you must use boring textbook terms) where they fly up in front of the object of their desire to flash their wing patches in a harmless bit of vain strutting. All male traits.
Many of these smaller traits of plumage are quite striking in their own rights and would have formed better naming material than that demeaning “lesser.” In fact, several of them have been explored in Spanish, the main language of the lesser goldfinch land, which extends south to Peru. In various regions, they have been known as the jilguero aliblanco (white-winged goldfinch) and jilguero capita negra (black-headed goldfinch). But the chief traditional name which you will find in the older English-language books is “green-backed goldfinch.” This is a solid, sensible name that identifies their most important differentiating feature of plumage—whether male or female—from the American goldfinch. And “greenbacks” is easily used in a friendly and convivial way.
Anything is better than “lesser!” Call them Californian goldfinches if you wish to be locally satisfied or Mexican goldfinches if you want to be internationally fair-minded. Call them greenbacks if you want to concisely distinguish them from those bigger yellow backs (that turn to dull putty in winter). Or just call them goldfinches, for that gold is in the end their most essential title.
Do we have a more brilliant goldfinch? Only one that fades. Do we have more golden birds? Only furtive natives of the tropics, orioles and tanagers, who spend more time away than here. So when you ask what bird shines brightest in California’s amber and green seasons, the answer is this goldfinch, who neither forsakes us nor grows gray.
Next to these masters, I have no ear for bird calls
Bright colors are advantageous for courtship or, for similar reasons, social standing within a flock. The other classic way for birds to demonstrate their personal superiority is through song. As I have discussed elsewhere, there are two overlapping “reasons” for song, in an evolutionary sense, with somewhat varying impacts on the consequent form of the song. As an average tendency, we can say that short, simple songs tend to be more important for territorial defense, while long, elaborate songs tend to develop when important for mate attraction: see the red-eyed towhee for an example of the first and wrens for an example of the second.
Goldfinches, given their limited interest in territoriality and their long, musical songs, clearly fall into this second category as well, often singing directly in front of their female auditor either from a perch or in a targeted display flight. “Wild canaries,” they are sometimes called, in evocation of their oft-caged cousins, famous for their singing. Spinus psaltria, our bird is formally titled: the lyre-playing bird (spinus was a classical bird name of now unknown identity; a psaltria was one of those charming lyre-playing ladies one hired for any good symposium. Fill the amphora! Recline upon the couches! And let the plectra of the psaltriae strike upon the strings!). For good reasons:
The greenback sings long and musical songs, often measurable in minutes.
The greenback sings for most of the year, through a long nesting season and beyond.
The greenback studies all year round, adding dozens of imitations to his song.
The first two aspects of greenback song are fairly straightforward causes for congratulation. They are long and classically musical, filled with a wide variety of pleasant sounds given continuously for several seconds or sometimes several minutes. Around here, their time of singing is quite extended: I would roughly estimate them to sing regularly from March through August (a solid half of the year, while some birds might sing frequently for only two or three months), with occasional singing occurring at any time of year. A bright sunny day in September might be greeted with a burst of song from a flock of goldfinches, while you will never hear, say, a titmouse singing at that time. I haven’t rigorously noted this schedule, but I think I can say with confidence that goldfinches sing often, as well as at length and musically.
It just keeps going and going.
It’s the third trait of greenback song that is most interesting: the way they extend and diversify their musical content, particularly with imitations of other birds. An individual singer might have a repertoire of up to 100 or so unique phrases. About 10% of the average song typically consists of the familiar greenback call notes introduced above. This is a good way to learn to recognize the basic identity of these songs, especially since they often begin with these: listen for those jarring, staccato flight calls as an intro and then interspersed, sinking tee-yees. Another 40% is made up of assorted musical notes which seem to be their own goldfinch inventions, but which are used only as song elements. And the remaining 50% are imitated calls or song fragments from other species of birds. All three of these components demonstrate their performer’s unique capacity for learning.
Goldfinch call notes provide a good reminder of how poorly we humans hear. My crude categorization above simply labelled their basic contact call as “a contact call” and “a series of quick staccato notes.” But studies with American goldfinches and many other members of the family have found that most or all of the cardueline finches use the flight calls for individual recognition. They sound the same to us, but in reality the males change their flight calls to match that of their female partner, so that each pair of birds shares a unique and distinguishing call, which they then utter when generally keeping in touch as well as in more intimate moments of bonding and private conversation. Goldfinches learn from their mates.
That next 40% of their songs, the non-imitative song components, also show learning. The various goldfinches in an area will share many of these same notes with each other, but have a different repertoire than birds in other areas: these are not their genetic heritage which simply popped into their beaks, but pieces of music which they learned from hearing other males sing. Without their intra-species sociability, their songs would be impoverished: goldfinches learn from their peers.
And it is the remaining 50% which is the most interesting of all, their imitations of other birds (and the occasional squirrel or other animal). They like to copy short sounds, each well under a second in length, which they throw into their songs pell-mell, mixed in with the other components. This is very different than the clearly divided, serial repetitions of the mockingbird, making it easy to overlook the majority of goldfinch imitations if you are not familiar with the original calls. Multiple studies have tried to pick out the imitated species, usually coming up with a total of 30–40 different birds. Among our local species, only the mockingbird challenges the greenback as a mimic, and even mockingbirds rarely know so many bird calls, which make up a smaller proportion of their similarly-sized repertoire of phrases.
I aspire to learn the calls of all our local birds and this is the constant test that shows me how far I have to go: I listen to the greenback songs and try to hear the birds they’ve heard. The song is fast. It changes every time. The questions will not repeat. You get no time to think. Are you ready to begin? Go!
How many imitations can you recognize?
The recorder notes that she hears imitations of American robin, house finch, oak titmouse, rufous-crowned sparrow, and American kestrel. I think I hear ash-throated flycatcher, western bluebird, and white-breasted nuthatch. In sixteen seconds! And we might well be missing more!
Those species-tallying studies revealed a somewhat unexpected phenomenon: goldfinches imitate birds that are not present on their nesting grounds. They aren’t simply repeating the sounds they are hearing around them at the time (a plausible layman’s hypothesis), or that they heard during the first few months of their lives (a plausible scientist’s hypothesis, since various other birds have an initial period of song-learning, after which their repertoire is fixed). Instead, they are learning and adding to their repertoires for at least several months and quite likely throughout their lives, remembering calls learned from both other goldfinches and entirely alien species during their period of winter roaming.
I like to think of this when I hear the greenbacks singing: that their lack of territoriality, in contrast to those stay-at-home titmice and towhees, translates into broader experience and learning. Their songs are not inborn and instinctive. Goldfinches travel, are exposed to new beings and new information, and they retain these memories and integrate them into their songs.
The evolutionary function of a diverse song repertoire is to impress females. Like humans telling stories of past adventures to impress their listeners with the breadth of their experience, the greenbacks sing their songs of strange sights and unknown calls. A bird might nest in the woodland, introducing calls from the chaparral. He might nest in the suburbs, bringing calls from the farm fields. He sings the notes of other finches he has met and the notes of strange and wonderful creatures that his listener may have never heard, reproducing them all with a stunning fidelity that no human storyteller could match.
Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage…
Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison
Happy he who, like Ulysses, has completed a great journey…
And has then returned, filled with experience and knowledge
– Du Bellay
Who crosses the borders? Who has heard what lies beyond? The little lyrist is the tale-teller, who has voyaged and come home. In his garrulous excitement, he sings from the treetops and he sings from the sky. A hundred sounds breathlessly come forth, with bird after bird instantly revived: flicker and flycatcher, falcon, wren, and robin.
Conclusion: the lovely little lyrist
Gentle, trustful, dainty, musical, inoffensive, sociable, and abundant—these adjectives certainly entitle their subject to the fullest recognition on the part of Californians.
– Dawson, The Birds of California
Dawson sums the greenback up in his usual style, laying out adjectives of personal compliment that turn out to be verifiable, scientifically significant facts. His instinct is to cast the facts into words of appreciation, which is a very healthy instinct for one’s general satisfaction with life, while it in no way diminishes their objective validity.
Goldfinches are gentle, trustful, and sociable—this informs their daily behavior with their peers as we observe it every day, and makes possible that abundance that we cannot help but notice. “Dainty” too we can admit, an out-of-fashion word that suggests their smallness without that derogation of the modern “lesser,” as well as the loveliness of their unequaled color, that gold that never fades. And “musical” is undeniable, the simple but inexhaustible word for that miracle of invention and of learning that adds up to a song unique in all our world of birds.
No bird outshines these weightless lanterns floating in the grasses. No bird outsings the little lyrists who each year travel and tell of what they’ve heard. But what finally is sweetest are these little thought-of truths: the greenbacks shine with less fear than all the greater goldens and sing without the anger of those whose songs are walls.
Header photo by Mick Thompson
Thanks for your wonderful description!! What kind of food will attract them to our San Rafael backyard?
Shelled sunflower chips are their favorite, which can be used in any general-purpose seed feeder. The traditional food for finch feeding is a tiny little black seed called Nyjer or thistle, usually offered in special feeders with appropriately tiny feeding ports, but around here it seems that many people get almost no activity on their Nyjer feeders from April through September or so. Sunflower chips will get activity all year round, though the goldfinches will still visit less in summer than in winter.
What a beautifully rendered portrait of these most frequent & numerous visitors to my feeders! I find their delicate, musical conversation ever cheerful – thank you for this wonderful post, Jack!
As a person new to the beauty of attracting birds to my garden in Larkspur, my feeders are almost exclusively populated by these beautiful ‘weightless lanterns’. I have been trying to find information distinguishing them from their larger cousins and this article was both factual and emotionally resonant for me. Thanks so much!
Jack you are such a poet and philosopher!! It elevates the lofty birds to even greater heights to read your lyrical and spiritual descriptions about them. The lesser goldfinch now has new meaning and fascination for me.
I fear that the reason our “back yard” diverse population of 10 species has been reduced to just 4 is
the removal of small shrub-like ornamental trees and, more significantly, removal of lower branches
(10-15 feet above ground) of the 150 year old Oak tree – a fire preventative measure.
Incidentally, birds seem to like hearing soft volume of music, especially the Jays.
Your eloquent, and comprehensive commentary is remarkable.