A year of my nature hunting: Day 28

Saturday 29 November 2014

Day 28 - Glorious Goldfinches

Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis)

Hi all.

Today's Day 28 and the end to my fourth week. To me that is a gold achievement so I have got some Goldfinches to mark the occasion. We were at Fairburn Ings nature reserve when we saw these wonderful birds and we sometimes get them in the garden too. Anyway I better get on with the facts about these birds so here they are:

Goldfinches stay in the UK for Summer and Spring but in Autumn they start to think about migrating south, sometimes as far as Spain.
They have long, thin beaks which allow them to extract inaccessible seeds from thistles and teasels.
They are getting tamer as every year people are recording seeing more on bird tables and feeders.
They are very sociable birds and often breed in loose colonies.
If you've never noticed, goldfinches have a smooth, liquid tone to their voice.
There are two other types of goldfinch to the one we see in England, the American goldfinch found in, you guessed it, America and Lawrence's goldfinch which is found in Southern USA.
Despite there only being three types of goldfinch, the European Goldfinch was successfully introduced into Australia and New Zealand over 100 years ago.
The goldfinch is a Green Status bird but once it was probably a Red Status because of those Victorians who loved goldfinches being a cage bird which led to rapid decreases to the population.
As many as 132,000 in a year were sometimes caught just in Worthing, Sussex. Because of declines like this and other crisis's lead to the Society of Protection of Birds being formed which later became the RSPB.