Not a House Finch

We are walking through the UC Botanical Garden, checking out what is in bloom, and looking for birds. It's early March, so the really exciting change-over to spring birds hasn't begun yet. We're expecting the usual winter crew: ruby-crowned kinglets, white-crowned sparrows and fox sparrows, maybe a woodpecker if we're lucky.

Crossing from the California section to the the cactus section, we spot a few house finches, males with red heads and chests, females all streaky brown. One female is hopping near a small pool of water. Something about the bird catches my eye. It doesn't look quite right for a house finch. It's doesn't quite have the right heft, seems a little delicate. I look through binoculars and get just a brief look before it hops deep into a bush. The bill doesn't seem right for a house finch either—too narrow.  I take a few not-quite-in-focus pictures, and I'm still not sure what it is. Did I just get a funny look at a regular house finch?

When I look at the pictures later, I see it is definitely not a house finch. The thin bill is a clue, as is the patch of yellow on the wing. It's a pine siskin, the first I've ever seen!

Pine siskins are occasional visitors to the bay area during winter. They live in nomadic flocks that range widely and unpredictably looking for seeds, particularly conifer seeds. They are much more common further north and higher in the mountains, which is also where they nest in summer.

It kind of amazes me that i am still seeing species I've never seen before here after 19 years living in the area. Part of this just points to the complexity of the patterns of what creatures are where, when. These birds are not really rare here, but when they appear depends on the ebbs and flows of seed production in the Sierras, the Northwest, or even Canada. 

Another aspect of this is my increased attention to identifying species, and increased skill at noticing when a glimpse doesn't match the common bird I'm expecting. I've read that birders use the same parts of our brains (the fusiform face area!) for bird identification as what people use for facial recognition. Our brains have evolved to recognize individual people quickly, immediately understand our relationship to our human community. I like that we can harness that power to recognize members of the wider community of our ecosystem.

Links:

Pine siskin information from the Cornell Lab

UC Berkeley Botanical Garden

Blog post about the fusiform face area and birding from ornithology.com