Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Matt Young is the founder and president of the Finch Research Network, which has done very important work on one of my favorite birds of all as well as one of the most fascinating eruptive species, the Evening Grosbeak. When I moved to Duluth in 1981, the Evening Grosbeak was one of the most abundant birds in my yard, almost year-round, from late July through early June, leaving only during their actual nesting season. Now I can go a year without seeing even one in my yard, yet in 2021, a large flock spent late winter through much of the spring in my yard. I talked to him and Lillian Stokes about this wonderful bird and its distressing decline.

MATT: You know, when we covered, just to kind of add a little bit here, you know, we talked about the eruptions, we talked about feeding, you know, what makes these birds so incredible in so many ways is, you know, there’s kind of the garden variety backyard finch that a lot of us have, and then there’s these mystery finches that come from the far north, and obviously we’ve been working on Evening Grosbeak Road Recovery Project the last few years where we’re banding birds and tagging birds and trying to get a handle on what has led to the declines there, and that’ll be an ongoing project, and we cover that in a research conservation section of the book.

,,,but yeah, 92% decline over the last 50 plus years. It’s, you know, like you said, a bird that is, you know, it’s very super charismatic and iconic in so many ways. And back, you know, we all kind of have that story of talking to people that used to see them abundantly, like you said, Laura. And, you know, now they used to be called, you know, the nicknames are grocery beaks, because people would, you know, they really drive, they seemingly probably really drive seed sales when we have these eruptions.

Now, there’s been a budworm outbreak. There’s certainly tied into in the working group. You know, I’m a co-leader on the International Road Recovery Working Group for evening grosbeak with David Yenny, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. And, you know, we’re trying to figure out what’s going on and we kind of have some focal, like topics that were covering our committees in the group. You know, is it diet? Is it a budworm thing? Is it habitat change? Is it, you know, some kind of, you know, collision thing? I mean, they’re, they’re actually USGS people that we’ve worked with on this project. They’re they’re actually number one in the number of collisions at windows.

LAURA: Yeah, Daniel Klem was publishing that back in the 80s that the Evening Grosbeak is one of the top species colliding with windows. And there have been some major kills on roads where they were drawn down to salt.

MATT: They’re number one in the USGS database. Yeah. So it’s kind of interesting. Finches in general, because of their flocking nature, leaves them a bit more susceptible. So the placement of windows or feeders to your house and windows and using bird friendly, you know, on your windows is super important. I always say, you know, wellness for finches is wellness for you kind of thing. So yeah,

LILLIAN: take care of those finishes. We have information in the bird feeding chapter about how to protect your windows from birds hitting your windows, which is a biggie if you feed birds, you know, you want to be responsible. And you know, I remember to huge numbers of grosbeaks and going through major amounts of sunflower in the in the 80s and things like that. Even before that, it was, they kind of reached the East, the whole Eastern Seaboard by the mid 60s. So this was a Western expansion. And, you know, we don’t fully understand the whole thing, but it may have had to do with quote the baited highway of box elder seeds that were planted that gave them food sources as they moved across.

But certainly the budworm outbreaks, which is another biggie has heavily contributed to both their proliferation and then to some extent is it leading to their, their decline. So hopefully the road to recovery Evening Grosbeak projects that are satellite tagging them and finding out all kinds of amazing stuff.

You know, we have information about that in the book, but there’s certainly they’re big and they’re charismatic and we’ll see what’s happened in this this winter. Will we see more of them or not everybody, you know, stay tuned. Get about get out your piggybacks to to or take up collections for bird seed if if they’re coming, we will find that out when the winter finch forecast comes out.

The winter finch forecast will come out on September 29. That was Lillian Stokes and Matt Young, authors of The Stokes Guide to Finches.