The Flower Destroyers

  Have your zinnias lost their petals on the bedpost overnight? Have you been finding puddles of brightly colored sepals and denuded heads, still gaily ringed with the bright yellow “true flowers” in the center? I sure have. Experience has taught me who dun it.

You have a guilty look on your face, sir.

                                Wut. I’m just a goldfinch, perched decoratively on a flower.

I’ll just, ehm, go up in here and do my…thing…

He pulls on the bright red sepal. The seed remains in the flower head. Oops. Ideally, the seed comes out, still attached.

He takes it in his toes, finds it empty of food, 

holds it for a precious moment (click!) and lets it drop.  The red petal is an exclamation mark on my excitement at capturing him red-billed!

Though the shady north side of my house isn’t perfect for zinnia growing (they’re full sun plants), I couldn’t resist planting one where I could enjoy it from the studio. I’ll draft a zinnia to suffer through the shade every year now, if I can just photograph this scene again!

While we're on goldfinches, you may have noticed that this early autumn male is looking a bit dingy, soiled. His feathers are worn, and the olive feathers of winter are showing through.

Look closely at this photo. Can you tell the parents from their two babies?  Two of these things are not like the others. Two of these things are not the same.

It's all in the wingbars. Newly fledged goldfinches (like my patient) have bright wingbars, tinged with cinnamon, and cinnamon-touched  edges on their secondary wing feathers. The badly worn adults have lost all the white trim on their secondary coverts (wingbars) and remiges (flight feathers). So in the photo above, from left to right, it goes Mom (no wingbars), Baby 1, Dad (no wingbars),  Baby 2.

The incessant peeping of young goldfinches continues in my yard well into October, as these late-breeding birds finally bring off their fledglings. Why, they're peeping today, October 12! Goldfinches are among our latest breeders, waiting for weed seeds to come ripe before building their nests. Even though feeders fill in the gap, the age-old commandments of nature rule their days, pushing breeding into September. When the baby goldfinches finally stop peeping for food, winter is well on its way.

We'll check back in on our injured goldfinch in the next post.

Don't Dress Up a Goldfinch

When I first put the goldfinch with the broken coracoid in her small recovery cage, I had a couple of jar lids on its floor. One had a mix of thistle, millet, cracked corn, black oil sunflower, and hulled sunflower chips. The other had water. I went back to my work and kept my ears cocked for the sound of a finch cracking seeds. I prayed this juvenile goldfinch would be developmentally ready to pick up her own food. This would greatly improve her chances of healing. Imagine if I had to catch her and force-feed her several times daily. The damage that broken coracoid could sustain if she fluttered and tried to escape each time I reached in the cage could queer the whole healing process. The big problem with rehabilitating finches is that tiny, slippery, conical beak. Combined with her strong, seed-cracking masseter muscles, a conical beak is real trouble for a rehabber. First, because of those strong jaw muscles, if she wants to keep that beak closed, it’s by God staying closed. Second, its shape and the slippery ramphotheca makes it all but impossible to pry open. You can’t get purchase on a conical beak, and she certainly wouldn’t trust me enough to open her bill for me to feed her. So if she was still being fed by her parents at the time of her window collision (which she almost certainly was), and she was as yet unable pick up any of her own food, we were in a real pickle.

 Finally I heard her hop down to the cage floor and saw her pecking at her food. Oh, thank the Lord. She was naïve, though, and still didn’t know how to process anything other than hulled sunflower chips. That’s OK. A diet of straight sunflower chips wouldn’t hurt her for two weeks. Big exhale.

Cutting legroom out of the wrap.

 I spent a lot of time thinking about the hurt goldfinch and coming up with her cool little glove-finger wrap. She spent a lot of time thinking about it, too. Then she spent a lot of time doing something about it.  From the moment I put her back in her cage, she was working to undo my neat little fix. She started at the turtleneck and worked, worked, worked at the yarn.  She barely stopped to eat. She’d grab a sunflower chip and go back to work, unraveling my awesome comfy wrap. She never ordered a wrap! She was sending it back.

Thinking back, I should have expected this. This is not a warbler, who picks insects off the undersides of leaves. This is a finch, who tears plant material apart to get at the seeds. She’s got mad mechanical skills. Goldfinches rip into prickly grass and thistle heads, digging until they find the seed. Shredding a soft woolen wrap was nothing for her. By the end of the first day, she’d shredded it so well that it she got her feet tangled in it, too, and she was immobilized on the cage floor. Oh well. All of you who praised my ingenuity, now please laugh with me. 

Goldfinch, you’re on your own here. I’ll keep you as quiet as I can, and you can rest and heal without intervention. 

Goldfinch in a Turtleneck

I thought about how to wrap the goldfinch's hurt wing. I needed something that wouldn't stick to her feathers, but that would stay on her. I thought and thought. Finally I came up with an idea I thought might work. 

I'd take a finger off one of my little running gloves, the cheap kind I buy on the grocery store rack when I lose the last pair I bought. I'd cut a hole in it for her good wing, work that one out of the slit so she could use it to balance, and keep the bad right wing folded up inside the tube. It'd be like a sleeveless shirt, but with one wing kept inside.

Here's the wrap, with a hole cut for her good wing.

It was pretty easy to slip it on over her head. Then I worked her good wing out of the slit I'd cut. 

Such a good, placid little bird, just lying there, letting me do this ridiculous stuff to her.

She didn't need the turtleneck, so I cut that away.

She couldn't stand or perch because the wrap came down too far on her legs, so in the photo below I'm  cutting a sort of notch or delta out of it to give her little legs full freedom of motion. The beauty of the idea is that the good wing, coming as it did out of the little slit I'd cut, would keep the wrap in place, keep the bad wing folded at her side until the coracoid could heal. Or so I hoped. 

Based on how docile she'd been, I hoped that she wouldn't be inclined to mess too much with the wrap, which was likely more comfortable than the usual wrap.

The way she held her feet together, as if she were praying for a good outcome, melted my heart. 

I've had a lot of experience with goldfinch behavior and cognition this summer. It has to do with the Secret Studio Feeder I established for Jemima. Tufted titmice came in and stole all Jemima's pecans and chicken, so I bought them off with a bowl of sunflower hearts. Goldfinches brought their babies and parked there, eating. And lots of them came into the house through the crank-out window into the studio, because I keep the screen out for Jemima photography. I swear the same goldfinches came in day after day and had to be hand-caught and released. Didn't I just catch you yesterday, sir?

 Goldfinches may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but they are among the sweetest. 

Next: What She Did.