Laura Erickson's For the Birds

This year we seem to be having a good redpoll invasion–even TV news reporters have been noticing them at feeders. When redpolls are around at all, their numbers are usually huge. These sociable little finches are especially welcome as feeder visitors. Their pleasing pink breasts, tiny yellow beak, black face mask, ruby red foreheads, and tiny size make them a visual treat, their cheerful twitterings and canary-like call notes provide a fine winter music festival, and their pleasant manners and curiosity bordering on outright friendliness make any time with them well­ spent.

Redpolls visit the northland from the far north. Their favorite food seems to be birch seeds–the first redpolls of the season, in November and December, are virtually always found in birch woods, and they don’t bother coming to feeders until the birches have been pretty well stripped. So early in winter the easiest way to find them is to scope out any little birds in the bare tops of birches.

They also eat many weed and grass seeds, and occasionally the seeds of pines and spruces. This time of year, when most of their natural food is harder to find, they start turning up at feeders. A big flock can eat enormous quantities of sunflower seed, but their favorite food of all is niger or thistle seed.

Although redpolls are unusually sociable birds, they do space themselves in a flat feeder or on the ground so that no two birds are within beak’s reach of each other. If one approaches too close, a dominant bird may raise its wings in warning or even peck at it a bit. Once in a while the offending party will strike back, but it usually just takes a step back so the two are at a comfortable distance once again. Redpoll plumage is so dense and thick that these little squabbles never end in injury.

Redpolls have the distinction of being the hardiest songbirds in the whole world–that is, they can survive temperatures colder than any other songbird, including ravens. They’ve survived for up to three hours in a chamber set at 50 below zero, and for at least an hour at 80 below. They’re exceptionally well insulated by their thick, soft feathers, and are capable of producing plenty of body heat by metabolizing their high-energy diet. To survive the long winter nights of the far north, redpolls have pouches along their esophagus which allow them to eat far more food than could possibly fit in their stomach during the brief daytime hours, and then to spend the frigid night digesting the fruits of this massive pig-out while shivering in the shelter of thick evergreen branches. The heat produced by those shivering muscles warms them, and they sleep shoulder to shoulder to share a bit of that warmth. It’s not a bad way for any of us to get through a long winter’s night–on a full stomach, snuggled against the warmth of a dear member of our own flock.