I had a hummer fly over to investigate the racket the starlings were making at the suet feeder (and boy, were they ever noisy). I've had them check out the goldfinches at the thistle feeder. Another time, a chickadee wasn't doing a darn thing, just sitting on a branch in the maple tree, minding it's business. I saw something buzzing by it, side to side, it was just weird. My eyes finally adjusted to see that it was a hummer. Just recently, the hummer went over to the suet feeder (I have a seed cake in it currently) and was torturing a chickadee, and eventually chased it away. I have lots of birds at that suet feeder lately (woodpeckers, cardinals, sparrows), but for some reason, the chickadee's seem to be targeted by my hummers!

This doesn't shock me after something I witnessed last year. We seemed to catch the "great goldfinch migration" with literally 40 to 50 finches in our yard during a 1 day period (our normal summer finch activity is 4 to 5 mating pairs of goldfinches and a few house finches). The goldfinches certainly swarmed the finch feeder, but the really weird behavior was how they all lined up at the border between the street and our yard in order to eat dandelion greens. To this day, I hay no idea why they were eating dandelion greens, but there is no question that is what most of the "flock" was doing. But eating chard leaves wouldn't surpise me.

Probably a male, given that I can see a little bit of the black crown spot starting to molt in. But, hard to tell for sure.

This reminds me of a surprising sight I had this summer. I happened to look out the window and see a cardinal walking along the edge of my wooden raised bed. Then it was poking into the self seeded borage that was growing there. I paid a little more attention because he didn't fly right off and then I saw it was a pair of cardinals. One on each side of the bed and I was close enough to see that they were actually pulling off the flower buds and doing something with them. I still don't know what. There were parts of the buds lying all along the edge of the bed after they flew away. I still thought, naw, they couldn't be eating the flower buds, but they came back repeatedly for over a month, doing the same thing. So, I don't know what they wanted with the flower buds, if they were eating them or finding bugs on them or what, but I found it entertaining and will definitely continue to grow borage if for nothing else than the entertainment factor. [g]. I do hope you figure a way to keep the gold finches out of your Shard. We don't eat Shard so I might have to put in a couple of plants to watch the Goldfinches. :-)