Lifestyles

Of a Feather: Any time now for the evening grosbeak

By BILL CHAISSON
By Bill Chaisson

As I sat with my mother, watching the birds visit her tube feeders yesterday, I was astonished by both the numbers and variety. Last year, she had been puzzled by how few birds came to her station and attributed it to the draw of her neighbor’s yard, where he maintained seven different “attractions.” Indeed, this year he has ramped it back to two, and my mother’s place is mobbed.

If you keep an eye on NH Birds online, then you know that it is a good year for irruptives, those northern species that only occasionally descend upon these latitudes, often when the conifer cone crop fails (hunger), is super-abundant (over-population), or there is a lull in insect infestations (hunger, again). This year, as far south as Jaffrey someone reported hordes of pine siskins, red crossbills, and a “noisy flock of evening grosbeaks.”

In the first part of last winter we were living over in Unity. One morning I glanced out the kitchen window at the bin feeder, and there was a lone evening grosbeak sitting there, munching on sunflower seeds. This was striking for two reasons: it was alone and silent, and I hadn’t seen this species since the 1970s.

I had a platform feeder outside my bedroom window when I was a teenager. The mid-Hudson Valley is considerably further south than central New Hampshire (200 miles), and I had never seen any of the northern “winter finches” there. But one winter (1974-75?) my platform was filled with these stocky, big-billed yellow and black birds that looked something like goldfinches on steroids.

“Grosbeak” is a sort of quasi-French word; “big beak” in actual French would be “gros bec.” However, you spell it, the name is an accurate description, but not a phylogenetic group. The closest relatives of the evening grosbeak (Coccothraustes vespertinus) are the Old-World hawfinch (C. coccothraustes) and a Neotropical bird called the hooded grosbeak (C. albellei).

Our “summer grosbeak,” as it were, the rose-breasted grosbeak, is more closely related to the cardinal, and very closely related to a western bird called the black-headed grosbeak, with which it hybridizes in the Great Plains.

Until the 19th century the evening grosbeak was a western bird. In the winter of 1889-90 a huge number of them “invaded” New England for the first time on record. At the time they were classified in the genus Hesperiphona (roughly, “sound of the sunset,” a reference to the Hesperides of Greek myth), but after the 1890 invasion this species returned to the east more often, and it now breeds coast to coast, from maritime Canada to British Columbia.

According to L. Nelson Nichols, writing in “Birds of America” in 1917, evening grosbeaks were first seen in New York City in 1911 (60 miles south of where I first saw them). In 1916 they returned to much excitement (in birdwatching circles). Nichols quotes Sara Chandler Eastman from an article in (the still-in-print magazine of the Audubon Society) Bird-Lore:

“The first record of the Evening Grosbeak at Portland, Maine, was made early in February, when a large flock settled in a mountain-ash on private grounds in the western part of the city. Throughout the months of February and April flocks of varying numbers were observed in different sections of the city, and birds remained until the eleventh of May, none being seen, so far as known, after that date.”

These are large finches, 8 inches long. Their big heads and bills give them a top-heavy appearance. The belly, rump, and part of the back of the male is bright yellow. This grades upward across the chest and upper back through shades of yellow into brown on the head. There is a broad yellow stripe over the eye and the beak is ivory colored. The wings are black on the primaries and coverts, but the secondaries are bright white, which gives them a white bar over a black bar when they are perched. The tail is black.

Where the male is yellow, the female is a soft gray, but the head is also gray, and the bill is an olive gray. The wings and tail are black, but in addition to the white on the secondaries, there is also a flash of white at the base of the primaries.

Evening grosbeaks are invariably described as noisy. In flight they utter a sharp, ringing kleeerrr, but when they are feeding together they gabble with a low, buzzy thirrr. Their song is a concatenation of these calls.

“The Birds of New Hampshire” calls the evening grosbeak a “very uncommon winter visitor and local breeder, primarily from the White Mountains northward.” This reference lists all the sightings in the state from the original 1890 flight through 2010. In the early 20th century they seemed to arrive at intervals of roughly three or four years.

By 1950 it was acknowledged as a breeding bird in the southwest highlands, but there has been a “major decline” in breeding incidence in New Hampshire since 2000. It has also become a less frequent winter visitor, recorded in the Christmas Bird Count at Concord only three times between 1995 and 2010.

The long-term trend of winter appearances in the state has been summarized as rising 1965-1985 and falling 1985-2000, although the breeding population generally rose 1965-2000. The decline in numbers since then has been attributed to improved timber management practices, which has led to fewer spruce budworm outbreaks. These insects are a major food source for evening grosbeaks.

During the winter, when they are not eating sunflower seeds at your feeder, these birds are found in maples, box elder and ash trees, feeding on the seeds. They also like sumac fruit and any other fruit still frozen or dried on the vine or tree.

Bill Chaisson, who has been a birdwatcher since age 11, is a former editor of the Eagle Times. He now works for the Town of Wilmot and lives in Sutton.

Avatar photo

As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.