Laura Erickson's For the Birds

The American Goldfinch is the state bird of New Jersey on the East Coast, Washington on the West Coast, and Iowa in the middle. (Many old bird books call it the state bird of my own state, but Minnesota didn’t have an official state bird until 1961 when the state legislature named the Common Loon.) The kind of popularity that makes a bird a state bird of three states, along with the goldfinch’s eye-popping beauty and its coast-to-coast range, must have made it an easy choice as the central photo on the cover of The Stokes Guide to Finches. The American Goldfinch entry in the book is 12 pages long, including lots of interesting information such as how the female bill color is a status signal among females yet doesn’t seem related to which females males select as mates. The goldfinch also is highlighted in the 14-page section about feeding and attracting birds, with tips to improve your enjoyment of backyard birds while ensuring the safety and well-being of those birds. This charismatic bird popped up in the conversation I had about the book with the authors, Lillian Stokes and Matt Young.

LILLIAN: People say, you know, why should I buy this book? You know, okay, I’ve got a field guide. Yeah, there are a couple of finches. I know what they are. And when we talk about how it’s something for everyone, you know, it’s for people who are in their backyard and just feed birds, because we have a wonderful section on bird feeding, how to do it, how to keep these finches safe at your feeder, not getting a disease, what’s the right kind of seed, feeders, we have photos of all this, we have the best information. And you realize something like what, some incredible number, 90 million Americans feed and watch wildlife in their backyard. It’s really quite phenomenal. So it’s for those people.

And even though they think they know their backyard finches, the book has so much cool stuff about them. For example, American Goldfinches, my neighbor thinks they disappear in winter because she’s just a very casual backyard feeder. In fact, American Goldfinches are the only finches that changes their clothes twice. They molt completely, this is a complete molt, in the winter, in the fall, and all those beautiful American gold finches we’re all watching right now are going to change into their winter coats, which are sort of duller and brown. And in fact, those feathers have more insulative value in winter, which is a very interesting fact.

Another cool fact about American Goldfinches are that females, when they breed, sometimes breed with more than one male. They have a nest, they mate, and they have young, and then partway through that nest, they may in fact go and have another nest with another male. That’s called polyandry, which is quite rare in birds. But when you consider that in American Goldfinches, in many of these finches, there are more males than females. It makes a lot of sense, there are all these extra males and they get to breed,and so does the female get to breed twice. So, cool stuff.

MATT: But that’s rare, though.

LILLIAN: It’s very rare, 4.9% of the time. So, it’s rare. But again, this was one study color-banded. You wonder, well, is it going on more than that? Is it going on in other finches? Some people think it might as well. So, there’s so much more to learn about these finches. I think in the book, we’ve taken all the science we could come up with and stuffed it into the book, made it interesting, and it makes you realize, wow, they’re really cool birds and there’s so much more to learn.

LAURA: The Stokes Guide to Finches provides 330 pages of this kind of information about the 43 finches we see in the United States and Canada.