Perhaps they are just passing through which might be better news for my pocketbook, but right my birdfeeders are swimming in House Finches. For the last 15 years I’ve seen very few of them in my backyard. And with the exception of last winter, my Project Feederwatch bird counts from the past bear that out. This flock showed up about two weeks ago.
House Finches are very common across most of the United States except the Great Plains, but that wasn’t always the case, says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: “The House Finch was originally a bird of the western United States and Mexico. In 1940 a small number of finches were turned loose on Long Island, New York, after failed attempts to sell them as cage birds (“Hollywood finches”). They quickly started breeding and spread across almost all of the eastern United States and southern Canada within the next 50 years.”
At feeders House Finches prefer sunflower, safflower and nyger. Unlike House Sparrows which carelessly fling seeds to the ground that they don’t like, House Finches tend to carefully select their seeds from a feeder, so they don’t make as big of a mess (which disappoints my chipmunk population scrounging on the ground below).
It can be confusing to try to tell the difference between House Finches and Purple Finches at your feeder. You can see a side-by-side and learn how to tell them apart here.