Sorry to hear that you are having such trouble already! Certainly won't have expected it this soon. House finches have been the worst bird in my orchards. They do a lot of damage to apples. Did have a Stella cherry in Amarillo that wasn't bothered too badly but then again the cherries weren't that good. I'm planning to cover my cherry block with 30% shade cloth when, if, any cherries arrive. May try to combine it with a rain shelter during the susceptible stage. We also have a lot of wind and some hail which the right shade cloth would help control. That is why I want to keep my trees to less than 10ft. I may just try to protect three trees or a nine tree block planted 9ft by 9ft. So that would be a shelter about 30ft by 30ft to cover nine trees. The shade cloth to cover that, top and sides, would probably be about $400-500. The frame to keep it up isn't to difficult to erect. I also might do something to reduce frost damage; heaters or sprinklers. It's all a lot of trouble but friends and family sure do enjoy the chance to stuff themselves with high quality cherries when they come in. A 30 by 30ft block could produce several hundred lbs of cherries. The Fruitnut

I haven’t had this experience (yet) because I haven’t embarked on my new gardening lifestyle. But, next spring will be a new day. I wonder if this damage occurs mostly in the spring, or if it is related to the birds raising young. Baby birds cannot eat seeds, and parents need to find insects or worms to feed their growing family. If insects are in short supply, maybe they resort to leaves. Are those of you who have had damage located in cities or suburbs, where there might be a limited supply of wild plants or insects? Maybe try planting a bed of sprouts for the birds and covering the real garden. They might also need the moisture from the leaves, if there isn’t a nearby source of water. Install a bird bath? Just my ponderings.

Hi, sorry, a little late to the party. I just moved to CO and this is my first winter here, used to live in MI. In MI, I rarely saw a finch in the winter. Here is CO, I have a lot of finches (red right now but some were yellow in the fall). I also get titmice (titmouses?), chickadees, downy woodpeckers, and flickers on a daily basis. Anyway, I have both black oilers in a tube and suet basket. The finches, titmice, and chickadees seem to like the suet. They eat both the seed and the suet, but the suet is what attracted them in the first place.

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.