busconews.com

by Neil Case

Three blue jays occupied the tray of the bird feeder outside my window, pecking at the seeds I’d stocked, scattering more seeds than they ate. Smaller birds, chickadees and titmice, nuthatches, cardinals, tree sparrows and house finches flew in from nearby trees and bushes, one or two at a time, each snatching a seed and flying away before one of the jays pecked at it. A red-bellied woodpecker flew in, defying the jays as it ate a few seeds, collected more seeds in its bill and flew away. It was the usual morning scene outside my window this time of year.

Fifteen or 20 goldfinches flew into one of the trees near the feeder, then started individually making forays back and forth between the feeder and their tree. I noticed but paid no attention, concentrating on my computer screen and the article I was writing.

A flash of yellow in a wing of one of the late comers caught my attention. Goldfinch? I though. But it couldn’t be.

Goldfinches, males, are bright yellow with black cap, wings and tail in spring and summer. This time of the year they’re dull colored, olive drab.

Pine siskin? I thought. It must have been.

Picking up my binoculars, always by my computer when I’m at my desk, I began inspecting each little bird as it flew, as it landed on the feeder and in the closest trees.

There were more than I originally guestimated, at least twice as many as I first thought. Most were goldfinches, as I had thought they all were. But there were pine siskins, too.

A pine siskin is the size of a goldfinch. It’s the shape of a goldfinch.

It’s brown, not olive drab, and it has streaks of darker brown on its back, breast and sides, but in a flock of goldfinches or a mixed flock of finches and siskins such as this was, the siskins look very much like the goldfinches. Except when they fly. They then show a patch of bright yellow in each wing. As I watched the goldfinches and the siskins and the other birds, now ignoring my computer, I wondered about the name siskin. Where is it from? What does it mean?

After the goldfinches and the siskins departed, I started reading about the siskins, trying to find the origin of the name. The pine siskin has a wide range. It’s a bird of coniferous forests of the north and at higher altitudes, in mountains, both east and west, in North America. There’s a second siskin, the Eurasian siskin, which is also a bird of northern forests, a bird with an even broader range than the pine siskin of North America, but none of my bird books gave any information about the name. In “Words for Birds,” however, Edward R. Gruson wrote succinctly, “the name is imitative.”

Imitative of its call or song, I presume. but the voice of a siskin is described in one bird field guide as “a loud chlee-ip, also a light tit-i-tit, a buzzy shree,” in another book as “a buzzy, rising zreeeeee, in flight a lengthy jumble of trills and whistles similar to a goldfinch.”

When conditions are right for siskins, they stay in their forest homes summer and winter. When conditions are wrong, presumably when there is a poor crop of seeds, siskins fly south in fall or winter. This means we see them one year and not the next or not for several years, or we may see them two years in a row. They’re described as erratic. And not just in winter. They may nest in a forest for a year, two years, several years, then disappear from that area. Just as they disappeared from my bird feeder that afternoon a few days ago and have not returned.