Thistle-tweaker
By Charlotte Owen
WildCall Officer
The goldfinch is a beautiful little bird, almost verging on the exotic with its scarlet facemask, vibrant yellow wing feathers and chunky, parrot-like beak. It is so smartly dressed that in some parts of England it’s known as the proud tailor, and there are no less than seven different colours in the goldfinch’s feathery suit. Such irresistible good looks combined with a joyful song - described as silken, liquid twittering - made the goldfinch a must-have for Victorian bird lovers and huge numbers were trapped to supply the cage bird trade. In 1860 an almost unimaginable 132,000 goldfinches were captured in Worthing alone, and the sheer scale of this ongoing endeavour soon caused a catastrophic crash in numbers. On the plus side, this spurred the creation of the Society for the Protection of Birds, now the RSPB, whose early campaigning against the trade helped to reverse the decline.
The ever-popular goldfinch has a ream of alternative names and perhaps the most beautiful is the Gaelic, which translates to ‘woodland flame’ or ‘light of the forest’ – but these birds are also regular garden visitors, brightening up the bird table in their search for seeds. In fact, they’ve seen a dramatic increase in recent decades thanks to a growing supply of readily available supplementary food. Their favourite is the fine, black Nyjer seed, which closely mimics their natural diet, but they are just as happy to feast on sunflower hearts and will often arrive in a large, sociable, twittering flock known as a charm. Their pointed bills are specialised to feed on the small seeds of plants in the daisy family, including groundsels, ragworts, dandelions and particularly thistles - hence the name ‘thistle-tweaker’ – and they are also well-adapted to prise out the tiny seeds from teasels. More often than not it’s the males that make the most of this food source, since their beaks are a fraction longer and they can access the teasel seeds without having to bend the spines out of the way. If you’d like to attract these charming visitors to your garden, try growing a stand of teasels – the flowers are fantastic for bees and other insects, too.