November 27th, 2014

When I got out of my car at Blair this morning, I heard a familiar sound, a welcome one that’s been absent here for a while.  A flock of about a dozen pine siskins were in the tree tops, and eventually came down to dine at the nyger feeder.  Siskins are birds of the conifer forests of the Canadian Shield and only come south in winters when seed crops are low.  They are highly nomadic, sometimes here one day, gone the next.  I had zero siskins at the Blair feeders last winter, but hundreds in 2012/13.  A lone tree sparrow was among the siskins foraging on the ground below the feeders.

In this video taken through my classroom window you can see that they are marginally smaller than the goldfinch (bottom right), heavily streaked and showing a bit of yellow in the wing feathers and tail. They have tiny, pointed beaks for extracting seeds from the cones of cedar, spruce and hemlock trees.

Siskins are often detected, as they were this morning, by their calls, both in flight and and while feeding.  Listen to their calls here.

 

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