A Good Year for Common and Hoary Redpolls

A few weeks ago I wondered if those hordes of pine siskins, the dark gypsies of the North, would stay in New England for the winter. Would they move on to milder pastures, more fruitful cone bearing trees to be precise? We are still not certain, but the reports are getting fewer, and the siskins that visited my yard certainly did not stay.

Those dozen or so clinging to my feeders at the end of October did so for only a couple of days. One or two showed up for a week thereafter, then nothing. The trees are deserted, the fires are cold, and there is no merry music to be heard from the groves. Do not despair, there is more than one gypsy on the wind.

After all, we have our very own home-grown variety, the goldfinch. They are still bouncing around from feeder to treetop, chuckling to themselves. Perhaps they are thankful that their pushy cousins have moved on. Whenever the pine siskins come to a feeding station, they seem to dominate.

The goldfinches better not celebrate too early, because there is a third small gypsy finch from even farther north than the siskin, and it is even pushier. This is the common redpoll, the bright gypsy, as white as the siskin is gray, which is to say, white only in its base color. The redpoll has dark streaking much like the siskin, but those streaks are laid upon a very frosty background.

Flocks of redpolls were reported as early as mid-November in New England, but mostly in the wild, not from feeders, and most often near the coast. Three weeks ago, our club was searching the birch groves of the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield and encountered redpolls.

Only a few miles from the coast, the vast pastures of the sanctuary are a favorite haunt of several rare long-eared owls, which usually roost by day in a large birch grove. We found no owls that day, but a flock of eighty or more redpolls was clustered at the top of a birch tree loaded with catkins. The tiny finches clung to the twigs and pried the seeds out, muttering their thanks as the ate their fill.

In their Arctic home, they feed on shrubby birches, knocking the seed to the ground, then consuming them there. They have an extra holding tank in their necks to get them through the storms and darkness of the Arctic winter. Seeds are stored undigested in this second pocket, then spit up and consumed as needed in the protection of a dense evergreen shrub or tree. It is another amazing adaptation of the bright gypsy.

These flocks are in constant motion, some birds flushing and circling while others remain still. At some unknown prompt, the whole crowd bursts into the air, chipping and chattering as they go. Then they returned in a swarm to alight again. It was difficult to study these busy birds against the gray sky, so I was pleased when a single bird showed up at my feeder the other day. This bird was heavily streaked on the belly and on the entire upper parts from head to tail, as a common redpoll should be.

It was similar but also unlike the two redpolls seen a couple of weeks ago in West Springfield. Friends had called one morning to report two birds at their feeder, but these were unstreaked on the rump and nearly so on the belly. They were hoary redpolls, the brightest of all gypsies, with a name that bespeaks both their frosty aspect and their homeland. It took keen eyes and experience to realize these were a once in a lifetime yard bird.

I was fortunate enough to see this pair before they left later in the day. In thirty years I had seen the hoary redpoll only four other times, always before in company with hordes of common redpolls. There may be no one else in New England that ever had hoary redpolls alone at their feeder. Common redpolls invade the Northeast about every other year, but usually such invasions occur later in January or February. Such an early arrival indicates a serious food shortage in the Arctic. There is no telling where these flocks will end up in their never-ending search for seeds.