Glorious Goldfinches
By Rory Dimond
The Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis is a small songbird with a delicate beauty. Their plumage is the colour of beach sand above and china white below, offset by bold black, white and yellow markings and a striking scarlet face bearing an ivory bill. The goldfinch’s voice is charming too, with a complex song described as “a liquid tinkling with trills ” by the RSPB. A group of goldfinches is even called a ‘charm’, derived from the old English ‘c’irm’ which describes the blended tinkling sounds they make.
An adult Goldfinch in all its glory © Mike Pennington
The golfinch’s narrow, pointed bill is well-suited to prising small seeds from plants. Charms will descend on fields of seeded Teasels, Thistles, Knapweeds and Dandelions, working their way around the seed heads. Indeed their scientific name Cardeulis comes from the Latin for thistle; ‘Carduus’. In winter they seek tree seeds such as Alder, Birch and Plane, hanging acrobatically from the finest twigs to reach them.
There is more going on in these feeding flocks than first meets the eye. Instead of simply plucking the seed, these finches have strong jaw muscles to open their bill, which they use to prise the seed sheath apart. They then pick out the seed with their tongue. The different sexes also prefer different plants. Males have slightly longer bills to feed on teasels, whilst females prefer thistles, an observation noted by Charles Darwin. This behaviour is known as ‘niche separation’ and reduces the competition between potential mates.
When nesting season comes, most songbirds seek dense cover, but goldfinches prefer to build on the end of a tree branch. The cup-shaped nest has high sides and is secured to the twigs with scavenged spider’s silk and woven grass to save the eggs or chicks from tumbling in the wind. Once the offspring hatch, they have the less-than-charming habit of caking the outside of the nest. This is assumed to make them unappetising to predators! This behaviour is another opposite to the normal songbird strategy of carrying waste away to avoid predators detecting the nest.
The chicks grow fast on a nutritious soup of regurgitated seeds and insects, and the parents may have three broods a year. As with most young birds, juvenile goldfinches are less striking than their parents, being a streaky grey-brown with no head markings However, they are still recognisable by their yellow wing bars.
A curious young goldfinch © Aardwolf6886
An adult feeding on Plane tree seeds © Zeynel Cebeci
With their beautiful plumage, pleasant song and prolific breeding, goldfinches were highly popular as cage birds in the 19th Century. Sadly, huge numbers were captured from the wild for this trade, almost wiping out the species in many areas. A Keeper of Birds at the British Museum noted talking to a retired trapper, who related of catching twelve dozen goldfinches in one morning on the waste ground where Paddington Station now stands!
In light of this situation, saving the goldfinch became one of the first aims of the Society for the Protection of Birds (the all-female predecessor of the RSPB). Their campaigning changed public opinion and instigated increased legal protection of songbirds, ending commercial trapping.
Goldfinches are now a conservation success story, with a population estimate of 299,000 breeding pairs by the British Trust for Ornithology in 2011. Once considered a bird of the open countryside, in the last few decades they have made a dramatic influx into gardens and urban areas, where their numbers are booming. This is largely due to people feeding the birds in their gardens and the increase in variety of bird foods offered. Niger seed and sunflower hearts are particular goldfinch favourites. These beautiful songsters are now a regular source of joy to people in their homes, no cage required!
If you’d like to find out more about birds, check out the 2020 Hampstead Heath Bird Report or join one of our nature walks!
Goldfinch feeding from a niger seed feeder
