Winter Finches

 

American Goldfinches

Male Goldfinches don't have the brilliant coloration they'll take on in breeding season but they liven up cedar trees (Juniperus virginiana) where they spend a lot of time in winter feeding on the little blue juniper 'berries', the female seed cones.

Goldfinches are primarily seed eaters. Lately they've become interested in privet berries.

They don't swallow the berries whole but appear to mash up the pulp to get at the seeds and crush them with their broadly conical bills.

Common Redpoll

Redpolls also forage in cedar trees but use their narrowly conical bills to find tiny bits of nourishment within the branchlets.

These birds, spritely like Chickadees in their acrobatic movements, make birch trees their favorite winter feeding stations.

Redpolls are able to extract seeds from the birch catkins with their sharp little bills.

Pine Siskin

Siskins are similarly equipped to probe for seeds within the scales of pine cones.

White-winged Crossbill

High up on a cedar tree this unusual visitor to Halibut Point surveys the landscape for its preferred food source. Crossbills have developed specialized beaks for a unique diet and harvesting technique.

Crossbills spend most of their time in spruce trees where they pry cones apart by biting and twisting with their bypassing hooked mandibles. They then extract seeds with their tongues. 

These examples of remarkable beak adaptations to specific food sources bring to mind Charles Darwin's observations on Galapagos finch morphology that anchored his theories of evolutionary development in Origin of Species.