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The Purple Finch

My Grandma Skala saw eye to eye, in a sense, with Roger Tory Peterson, famous ornithologist, artist and writer. Grandma, un-influenced by prior reading or ornithological study, provided my mother and me with a perfect description of the male Purple Finch’s color in around 1941. We were relaxing on lawn chairs in the shade of the McIntosh apple trees in our back yard in Kewaunee during mid-summer. The pedestal birdbath was nearly within arm’s reach of where we sat.

Suddenly, without warning, a colorful pale geranium-red bird landed in the middle of the bath, somewhat startling us. Grandma took one look at the creature and exclaimed with her wonderful, happy style, “It looks as though that sparrow fell into some raspberry juice.” Many years later I read where Dr. Peterson described the male Purple Finch as “a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.” My Grandma was absolutely correct on both counts. It was a House Sparrow in shape and size, and the color of ripe raspberries. None of us knew the correct identity of the welcome stranger that had arrived in the twinkling of an eye. Not having any bird books at the time, its proper name didn’t become known to me for several years.

A male House Finch sports a bright red streak.

That afternoon as I walked along Vliet Street near the county courthouse on my way to town I noticed a small bird bathing in a puddle of water next to the street curbing. What a pleasant surprise it was to see my second “raspberry sparrow” of the day. Apparently the color purple, as seen by ancient students of birds, was not the purple of today’s world but rather a brick red, pale geranium, raspberry, or even rosy crimson.

I banded songbirds for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for about 25 years, and many fellow banders and I described the Purple Finches as erratic wanderers. They will patronize home feeding stations during the winter in prodigious numbers one year, then be scarce to totally absent the next. Henry and Edna Koenig, of the famous “Bird House” in Sauk City years ago, banded 5,339 of these little biters over a five-year period in their backyard. Their high total of 2,010 occurred in 1965. It was common to observe as many as 600 at a time carpeting the ground beneath the feeders and decorating the trees near their home.

My best total for one day came on March 24, 1963 when I banded 180 in one day at the home of friends near Mill Center, northwest of Green Bay. Over 600 were banded there during three consecutive weekends that early spring. One male was recovered near Prince George, British Columbia 61 days after I had banded it. This is about 1,800 miles as the crow flies (oops, as the finch flies!). Several banding friends from Michigan had similar experiences. However, their Purple Finches were recovered in New England. Nevertheless our studies proved that, in addition to their usual north to south migration, some of these hardy, bubbly singers move in an east-west direction as well.

It appears as though this may be a fall and winter of Purple Finches in our state. At least two dozen have been feasting on black oil sunflower seeds in recent days at our place. By the way, the heavily streaked, brown and white individuals can be first-year or early second-year males as well as young or adult females. Their plumage is very similar. It is not until late into their second year that the males begin to show their rosy feathers. In other words, the raspberry-colored finches you may see now and into winter are the adult males, but the brown and tan-streaked finches cannot be sexed at any time of the year by casual viewing unless, for example, you observe one of the brown and tan-streaked individuals feeding their young during nesting season. Then you can be assured it’s an adult female.

Two Purple Finches grab a bite to eat, but the brown one is not necessarily a female.

Purple Finches belong to a large group of Old World seed-eaters which includes the American Goldfinch and other species. Its generic name, Carpodacus (car-po-DAK-us), means fruit eating, while its species title, purpureous (pur-PUR-e-us) is self-explanatory. One of its western relatives, the House Finch (tabbed the Hollywood Finch during the early 1940s) was illegally trapped in quantity and shipped to New York City where they were sold as colorful, highly musical cage birds. Federal agents quickly stopped this unlawful act and released the birds into the wild. Consequently the population of House Finches is steadily spreading in the Midwest as they “make their way back to Hollywood!”

It is easy and quite common for people to confuse the Purple Finches with House Finches. The red color on the male House Finches, which generally is confined to the upper chest and head areas, is what I call a “Mercurochrome red” rather than the softer raspberry red of the Purple Finch male which has much more rosy coloring in general, especially on the head and rump. The female and young Purple Finches can be easily told from the House Finches by their heavy streaking on their flanks and undersides and also by their wide, dark, ear patch and whitish eyebrow.

The Purple Finch’s nesting range extends from central Wisconsin to central Canada where it stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. One could describe them as being strictly tree-dwelling birds of the forest, never far from especially evergreen trees. They winter from southern Ontario and southern New England clear down to the Gulf of Mexico. People with good hearing will enjoy the ecstatic, easy flowing, musical warble the males produce. These persistent singers can be quite variable pouring forth loud, rich, warbling songs one moment and pleasantly soft arias the next, somewhat like a gently boiling teakettle.

One feature of their anatomy that I learned very quickly while banding them is their strong, stout, cone-shaped bill. They are biters par excellence while contained in the hand. As a matter of fact practically all birds strongly resent being touched by the human hand.

The scarcity of this bird one year and its abundance the next is one of the Purple Finch’s maddening charms. Perhaps this is why we enjoy birding so much. There is always the thrill of the unexpected, such as the “sparrow” that accidentally fell into the raspberry juice!