Absolutely Lesser Goldfinch. By the way, I don't know how much time you spent looking at warbler pics, but you would have saved yourself that effort by noting the bill shape: warblers have much thinner bills. Bill shape and size is often a good clue to point you in the right direction; bright colour patterns you'll likely remember without trying, but the bill really needs to be looked at (unless we're talking about a toucan or spoonbill etc). Just a friendly hint. -O-

There are instructions under "Instructions" at the top of the page for uploading photos but they don't work for me because I use Safari. You canpost your pictures to photobucket.com. Then select a picture you want to post, copy all the data in the "HTML code" box and paste that into your post here. You don't have to reduce your images to load them into Photobucket. Good luck.

Hi Rachel, Sorry - I live in eastern Massachusetts, 7 miles north of Boston and I live in a suburb with a little wooded area bordering my backyard, and a wildlife reservation and ponds about 1/2 a mile away (I am very fortunate!). It has been very cold here the last few days and we got our first dusting of snow yesterday. I have seen different kinds of birds here within a mile of the house - woodpeckers, hawks, swans, geese, the common feeder birds, we even have a heron who flies back and forth over our neighborhood every day - so we do get a variety of birds. We definitely do have house sparrows, but these little guys I saw yesterday were not those. They were just about a solid brown from where I could see. No striping or definitive marks. They just hopped around eating stray sunflower seeds. I've gone through photos of species, both genders and juvenile appearances, on the internet and in my books, and I am not sure what this bird was. The only even remote possibilities I could come up with were: field sparrow; junco; and female indigo bunting. If you have thoughts on this I would be most appreciative. Thanks, Donna P.S. Your last set of photos was, as always, astounding. Congrats on your new lifer!

Let's close this thread. It dates back to early 2015 and is way too long and it confuses people when they see two Birds and other mobile features... threads going at the same time. There's a later thread, Birds and other mobile features in the garden 2015 #11, that's current and will continue until it gets too long and the 2016 threads start. In general, I have no problem if people want to continue a discussion on an earlier thread with relevant comment, but newer posts are better put in context with newer threads (that sounds a little convoluted but I hope it makes sense). Claire