First purple finch of the winter

Note the very distinctive stripes on the head and the slightly forked tail. The size of the overwintering population here varies considerably. The food supply available in the northern coniferous forests seems to determine how many we get. In hard years, we're swamped with them; in other years, we have none. This one is a female. Males have a purple wash over their head.

1 thought on “First purple finch of the winter

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s