Laura Erickson's For the Birds

I’ve loved birds since I was a toddler, but it wasn’t until I took up birding as a young adult that I realized how very many birds were living all around me that I’d never noticed before. Day after day, month after month, my awareness snowballed. I’d birded over a year before I saw my first Pine Siskins—a pair of them nesting on the Michigan State campus. My ornithology professor told us where the easy-to-find nest was on campus, close to the sidewalk in a tree I’d been passing several times a day that whole term. And the nest was just below my eye-level—how could I possibly have missed it? When I watched them, the parents occasionally made little twittering sounds—something they must have been doing for at least a couple of weeks as they built the nest, produced their eggs, and now incubated—yet just inches away, I had been utterly oblivious!

Unlike many of their colorful relatives in the finch family, Pine Siskins are easy to overlook. They’re tinier than sparrows with a plain face and very drab plumage—the most colorful individuals may have bright yellow on the wings and/or tail, most easily noticed when they’re in flight, but many show hardly a trace of color. And their un-finch-like slender bill stumps a lot of people—over the years, I’ve heard from a great many radio listeners asking what these little birds could be.

Many of their twittering calls are fairly similar to those of redpolls, but siskins occasionally throw in a rising zzzzzzzz unique to them.

In the past couple of weeks, Pine Siskin numbers have soared in my yard. Once in a while I pick out a stray goldfinch, redpoll, or Purple Finch, but often when I sort through as many as 100, the flock is entirely Pine Siskins.

They may never win a beauty contest in competition with other finches, but they’d most certainly be in contention for “Miss Congeniality.” They’re so wonderfully sociable and surprisingly tame that their constant twittering fills me with good cheer even when I’m reeling from the news.

As winter ebbs into spring, Pine Siskins usually start collecting in even bigger numbers at my feeders, and my maternal instincts rev up, too. Any seed or shells collecting on the ground or in feeders will rot and mold, subjecting these adorable little guys to salmonella, botulism, and other pathogens. Even when the temperatures stay below zero for a while, I’m always on alert in my own yard, and when the snow starts melting, I turn into a mama bear when I notice rotting seeds in other places as well. With the increasing number of mild days in winter, raking or shoveling up and disposing of spilled seed has become a winter routine rather than the one or two spring cleanings I used to do. The cleanliness of our feeding stations should always be a higher priority than how many birds we attract. During a crisis such as the current epidemic of bird flu, this is absolutely critical.

Watching all the little siskins visiting my feeders makes me very happy, calling to mind one of my most memorable experiences, involving a nestling Pine Siskin who had been attacked by a cat in Duluth when I was a new and still fairly inexperienced wildlife rehabber. I’ll tell you about that next time.