Hi lazypup,

Is that a purple finch actually? I have a hard time telling one from the other sometimes, but it seems that this bird has more coloring, and more of a raspberry color, than the usual house finch.

chickadeemelrose...that is a male House Finch, Purple Finches are more of a raspberry color and do not have the brown streaks in the breast. We have tons of House Finch year round and a few Purple Finch in the summer months. Once you see them, you can tell the difference quite easily. The young though are very similar to the female House Finch, I got to watch one change into his adult colors throughout one summer, quite fun!

Lazypup....our House Finches stay year round so I have been watching them all Winter. Our Robins returned on Friday (12th) and the Redwings and Grackles returned on Saturday (13th). I am waiting/watching for the return of the Bluebirds.

Donna

Normally House Finches winter over in this area but for reasons known only to the birds, they all disappeared in early December and are just now starting to return.

According to the state Audubon Society Purple Finches winter here but they are cyclical. About once every decade we see an over abundance of them, but generally they are rare and in some years totally absent.

I went back and did some additional research on the House Finch.

It appears that they are really a non-native species that were originally kept as cage birds. A small number of them were accidentally released on Long Island,N.Y. in 1940 and they first appeared here in Ohio in 1964. By 1980 they had spread across the entire state of Ohio and have established a very successful breeding ground here.

What I found most interesting in my research is the fact that the railroads are attributed with the wide spread of both House Finches and the European House Sparrow. Both species were initially released in the New York area. Having been introduced into an urban habitat they were initially unfamiliar with the local flora and fauna, and therefore relied heavily upon man made food sources. It is believed that many initially found the most abundant sources of food near warehouses or food processing plants where grain or other foodstuffs gets spilled from railroad cars during the loading and unloading process. Some of the birds were inadvertently closed up in the railroad cars when the doors were closed and they were transported to distant cities before the cars were opened again. This accounts for why their is an abundance of these birds in urban areas while they are often considered rare in rural areas.

Thanks folks for the explanations. I truly did a lot of reading on the Cornell website to help me with the id (because I thought that this bird had a lot of color!) But with your info I will be better able to identify the two when I see them. Thanks - and lazypup - very interesting reading you provided on the non-native species. Thanks for that too.

Last year, I get one of these, now they are fairly numerous in our yard. They visit both the nyjer seed and sunflower seed feeders.

House finches are native to the western US. As lazypup said they were accidently released in the NY area in 1940 and spread from there to occupy the eastern US as well. Now they are common all over the continental US except for soutern Florida.Just didn't want them confused with non-natives such as European starlings & House sparrows.
Susan