End of October Reds

Some years, we go all winter without a Purple Finch at our bird feeder, but this year, a small group seems to have been waiting for the sunflower seed bonanza to begin. I hope the bears don't find the feeder again--they're the ones who "took it down" in the spring. It makes me nostalgic for the my time in the city, where people curse the squirrels for eating all the birdseed.

• Tricky Bird IDs: House Finch, Purple Finch, and Cassin's Finch
• Separating Finches from Cornell's "Birdscope."
• Purple Finch entry from Cornell's "All About Birds."
• John James Audubon's account of the Purple Finch. This is well worth reading--here's an excerpt.

  The song of the Purple Finch is sweet and continued, and I have enjoyed it much during the spring and summer months, in the mountainous parts of Pennsylvania, where it occasionally breeds, particularly about the Great Pine Forest, where, although I did not find any nests, I saw pairs of these birds flying about and feeding their young, which could not have been many days out, and were not fully fledged. The food which they carried to their young consisted of insects, small berries, and the juicy part of the cones of the spruce pine.