What Do American Goldfinches Eat?

Video Transcript

"American Goldfinches, one of America's favorites, because they are often called wild canaries, since in the summertime the males are bright yellow with black wings. They are seed specialists. They do eat insects and so forth in the summer, but they are particularly enamored with the seeds of things like thistle, and in the wintertime when people put out bird feeders, like some of the ones behind me here, they often will put niger thistle seed in them, and goldfinches are certainly one of the regular patrons, but the way the goldfinches are sort of connected to thistle is interesting, in that their nests are often largely lined with thistledown, which means that they're relatively late birds to nest in the season, because thistle doesn't set its seeds until later on in the summer, and the young are often fed with the seeds of the thistle, so that if you were to look at an American Goldfinch nest after they had finished nesting, you would see that there would be lots of thistledown in the lining. There would also be lots of droppings around the ring of the perimeter of the nest. One, the baby goldfinches are not particularly tidy in terms of how they dispose of their wastes, and so forth, but if you were to track goldfinches nesting, you would see them bringing in small insects, as well as seeds. They're primarily what we call granivores, or seed eaters. If you look at their beaks, they're sort of short and conical, which means basically they're adapted for cracking open small seeds, and so forth, so that they are essentially a seed eating bird, and as their name would suggest, they are a type of finch."