Music is the goldfinch’s greatest talent

Tiny, gold and garrulous — today’s bird is the California prodigy misleadingly called the lesser goldfinch. If you’ve seen a group of little yellow birds eating seeds at a feeder, then you’ve likely made their acquaintance and perhaps begun to question that unimpressive appellation. Old books called them green-backed, white-winged or California goldfinches — all better names than this dismissive “lesser,” which merely acknowledges that there are larger members of the family.

Almost everywhere you go, California’s greens and browns are dotted with these ornaments of gold. In one particularly wonderful outburst, William Leon Dawson — my favorite of all 1920s bird writers — responds with righteous indignation to a supposed authority on California birds who admitted to not having personally met with a goldfinch nest: “Not met with them! Shades of Audubon! Where were your eyes? For if there is one virtue which the green-backed goldfinch possesses above another, it is that of propagating.”

One of the clearest signs of bird propagation, of course, is bird song. And song is where the greenbacks most vigorously repudiate any labels of “lesser.” In truth, when scientists write about these birds, they don’t debate green backs, white wings or size. They call them Spinus psaltria, the lyre-playing finch. Music is their greatest talent.

Male birds each have a repertoire of up to a 100 or so unique phrases that make up their songs. About 10% consists of the call notes that we hear throughout the year. Listen for staccato series of “po-ta-to-chip” notes and high, sinking “tee-yee” whistles. Another 40% is made up of assorted notes used only within songs. And the remaining 50% are imitated calls or song fragments from other birds. All three of these components demonstrate goldfinches’ insatiable musical appetite and hunger for new sounds.

I called their most familiar flight call a staccato series; to us, it simply sounds like a quick repetition of three to seven short notes on an even pitch. But our clumsy human ears only hear the surface. Across the finch family, it appears that these staccato flight calls are used for individual recognition. They sound the same to us, but in reality, the males subtly change their calls to match those of their female partners, so that each pair of birds shares a unique and private password. Goldfinches learn from their mates.

The next 40% of their songs, the non-imitative song components, are also not mere random chatter. Goldfinches within a given region share many of these notes. These phrases are not a genetic heritage that all goldfinches are born with, but musical motifs that they learned from listening to others. Each winter, these birds gather into large, wandering flocks that sing with increasing frequency as spring approaches. Without these yearly flocking conferences, their songs would be impoverished. Goldfinches learn from their peers.

The remaining 50% is the most interesting of all: their imitations of other birds. Greenbacks love to copy short sounds they’ve heard and scatter them pell-mell throughout their songs, often drawing on a total of some 30 to 40 different species. A 20-second song might reproduce a dozen different sources. In California neighborhoods, only the mockingbird challenges the greenback as a mimic, but even mockers can’t keep up, can’t pour as many memories into a minute’s music.

The story grows deeper when we realize that they are imitating birds that aren’t present on their nesting grounds. Goldfinches travel and then retain those memories and stitch them into songs. Like people telling stories of past adventures to impress their listeners with the breadth of their experience, the greenbacks sing the unfamiliar voices of their California wandering. Each male sings the notes of finches it has met and creatures its courted listener has never heard, reproducing all with a fidelity that no human storyteller can match.

I walk out from my home or from a shop and in these paved-over places daily hear that music flowing out. Those high and lissome voices ramble on and on, skipping weightlessly out into the air of these unwild settings. They dance across 100 squeaks and whistles, kestrel cries and robin laughter, rivals’ innovations and the notes of the one they listen for, and never pause for breath.

Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato, leads walks and seminars on nature in Marin, and blogs at Nature In Novato. You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.