Female Goldfinch

(Toledo, OH) There has been a flurry of activity among the American goldfinches that take up residence near my house. The female goldfinch pictured on your left is eating a piece of a sunflower head in a stand of sunflowers I have growing in my yard.

This has been a banner year for goldfinches, perhaps in no small part due to the quantity of sunflowers I planted. I think there are a dozen nesting pairs within 100 yards of my house, at least based on the traffic my sunflowers are attracting (I could provide greater accuracy in the count if there were avian accounting equivalents of POS systems). If I continue to provide thistle seed in the bird feeders this winter, they might stick around all year (they tend to migrate by November or so).