I’m sometimes tempted to write an article called “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing,” just to clear up any misunderstandings about my level of expertise. I am not a trained horticulturalist or naturalist. I’m an enthusiast; an ambitious amateur who has gleaned so much good from an interest in growing things that I’ve decided to pass on what little know-how I have to my students and friends. Yet people come to me all the time for advice. I think I usually tell them helpful and accurate things. But, when your publishing schedule involves writing at least an essay a week and you’re also balancing a significant teaching load, mistakes can be made.
My friend Emily and I share a passion for birdwatching. She’ll sometimes send me photos she’s taken of owls in flight, knowing that their blend of grace and morbidity makes them my favorites. She’s forgotten more about the avian life in this part of the world than I’ll ever know, so when I published an article last year about Purple Finches that described an encounter with what was obviously a House Finch, she must have shaken her head and graciously decided not to correct me in public. Here I was, waxing poetic about attracting native bids back to our school’s campus, and simultaneously misidentifying one of the loveliest common birds in North America.
I am not the first to look at a House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) twittering away in a winter tree and think I was seeing a Purple Finch (Haemorhous purpureus). A simple Google search would have prevented the mistake: I wrote that article in February about an experience I’d had in January: a month when Purple Finches aren’t even in Eastern Massachusetts. I realized this with a shock three days ago as I was sitting by an impromptu campfire, looking into the striated goblet of our maple tree’s bare branches, where a little brown bird with a cranberry-red cap and flared chest perched in the sun, bubbling out its varied song. It was a moment almost identical to the one I’d written about last year. But this time, I had my phone with me and was able to identify it with a handy app. It turned out I’d had the wrong bird the whole time. Kicking myself for the laziness of the mistake, I began to research the little creature in earnest.
House Finches are native not to New England, but to Mexico and the American Southwest. They remained in that relatively small range, singing and flashing among the cacti and desert stones, until the 1940s, when they began to be sold illegally in New York City under the fabricated name “Hollywood Finches.” This marketing scheme met with success, distributing the little songbirds throughout the city as housepets. That is, until their real identity became widely known, and vendors and purchasers alike began to release them to avoid prosecution under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. It seemed like a death sentence to set these desert birds free over the cold East River. But it was the beginning of an unexpected explosion.
The House Finches quickly established an outpost from Southern New England to Chesapeake Bay, hugging coastlines and layering their sparrow-like song among the native music. Then, for reasons not entirely understood, they rapidly took over most of the United States between 1980 and 1994. A new strain of conjunctivitis wiped out huge portions of the population in the 90s and early 2000s, and the numbers have since remained relatively modest—around forty million compared with their all-time high in the hundreds of millions. But their range has not decreased. Improbably, paradoxically, these birds of the sand and sun have adapted with relative ease to an unimaginable variety of North American habitats and ecosystems, not excluding my garden in coastal Massachusetts.
They are charming birds, with both the brightly-colored males and the plainer, browner females singing in late winter and spring, with males taking over most of the music for the rest of the year. Their songs are a ruffling, bubbling series of short, melodic rises and falls, typically ending with a drawled longer note, a flourish like a violinist raking his bow at the end of a sonata. Aficionados consider this last note harsh compared with the more delicate ending of the Purple Finch’s song, but I personally relish it because it feels like an act of rakish mastery, as if to say “It’s spring and I’m in love, hesitation be damned.”
Their nesting season begins as early as March in the Northeast (February farther south), initiated with a mating ritual where the female sometimes impersonates the calls of a chick and will be fed by the amorous male. Having won her over mostly by the richness and depth of his coloring, he will continue to feed her as she shelters and incubates their eggs, foraging on the ground for all manner of seeds and grains, in addition to small insects like aphids—a fact that makes him a good friend to the gardener. He will bring such treasures back to a cavity nest of rough, whorled sticks and grasses that can be found almost anywhere, from the eaves of houses to the shelter of hanging plants. They mate monogamously and for life, returning to the same nesting sites over and over, and may raise two broods of two to six chicks a year.
Mite infestations can take a high toll on their chicks. In response, the female employs the mind-boggling trick of laying only female eggs first, managing the exposure of the late-arriving males to the mites, and thus ensuring that a roughly equal number of both genders survive to be fledged. They will be on the wing from eleven to nineteen days after hatching, adding their dash of carmine pink to the undergrowth, not to mention their virtuoso song. They have also been said to crowd out and persecute the ubiquitous House Sparrow, which is a virtue in my eyes even though both species are technically invasive, since House Sparrows add no sonic or visual beauty to the world: they merely live, breed, and cheep their repetitive, idiot grunt from dawn to dusk, hogging all the birdseed and bullying the prettier songbirds along the way.
I saw what must have been a House Finch sipping water from our new pond here at CCA late last November. The drought had reduced the pond to a brown puddle, around which starveling birds and mammals of all kinds had left prints in the mud, venturing into the open for sustenance until the rains came. The smoke of ongoing wildfires was hanging in the air, and its haze made a lurid purple of the light that suited the bird oddly well. Ecology is strange. The systems that govern it are infinitely interrelated and complex. Technically speaking, I suppose you could say that the little bird I watched twittering on a locust branch should not have been there. But I was glad to see it. And now I’m glad to know its name.
This is news to me. I too have always believed the house finch to be the purple finch. Thanks for the correction. I need to get my field glasses out and watch the feeder more closely this spring to see if we have purple finches in the area.
Oh well. As my Daddy used to say, "If you can't be right, at least be confident and people will think you are." With the footnote, "You probably know more about what you're talking about than they do anyway." That aside, I love your hunger to know more and to share your knowledge and experience! Love you to the moon. Mom