Another FOS

First of Season birds are fun to find and important to birders and scientists who follow migration information and data. As a ‘Citizen Scientist’ of sorts, I also find it interesting to track the arrival dates of my backyard birds.

Late yesterday afternoon, I came home to find a couple of the season’s first Lesser Goldfinch feeding with the hundreds of Pine Siskin and American Goldfinch I have in my yard. I just love these stunning birds; the ones here have the dark, black backs associated with the Eastern variety of the species. Supposedly, the ‘green-backed’ Lesser Goldfinch are the more Western variety, though it is noted ‘black-backs’ occasionally are found further west.

This first photo is one I took last year on June 1st, the first time I'd seen them. They seem to be a month earlier this year...but then I was so new then; perhaps I just never noticed them.

I think for awhile, I thought these tiny finches were displaying the difference in male and female Lesser Goldfinch; it took awhile to realize there are two varieties.

Males of both varieties are, as usual, more colorful; brilliant yellow below, with dark wings which are white at the base of the primaries. As the name suggests, green-backed Lesser Goldfinch are a dusky-green above; along the neck and the entire back is greenish…only the top, front of the head to the bill (not unlike an American Goldfinch) is black. The black-backed Lesser Goldfinch is black from the bill all the way to the tail; the entire upper body is dark…stunning against the pure, bright yellow of the lower half. These are our tiniest finch; only 4 ½ inches long and about 9.5 g…making them noticeably smaller than the Am.Goldfinch which is closer to 13 grams. You might also notice that this little goldfinch has a proportionally larger bill than do others.

Here are a couple shots of an American Goldfinch...so you can see how much more yellow they are:

You can find a couple more (poor) photos I took of Lesser Goldfinch here, and pages of photos of them on Google, here.

Except where noted, photos from Wikipedia