Bird Notes | Finches move in on hummingbird feeder territory

The bird-breeding season continues in our area, although some species are nearly finished with their seasonal duties.

Several folks have contacted me recently about small, “finch-type” birds visiting their hummingbird feeders and preventing hummers from feeding. The finch-type birds are house finches and are fairly common visitors to seed feeders in our area. As their common name implies, they’re common around human dwellings and often nest beneath the roofs of porches, sometimes in hanging plant baskets, usually anywhere there’s an overhang to offer protection.

In addition to seeds, these small finches have a “sweet tooth” and can frequently be found using hummer feeders that allow access with their larger finch beak. This time of year as young fledge, house finches travel in family groups of up to seven individuals, most frequently with an adult male leading the way. As with other birds, the adults are trying to feed their brood while also showing them where food is located. The old scientific name for the bird, Carpodacus mexicanus, translates as “Mexican fruit-biter,” so sugar water would certainly be on a bill of fare for these finches.

House finches are not native to Eastern North America. Their presence here is the result of human greed and ignorance. In the 1940s, some enterprising individuals in the pet trade in New York came up with an idea to capture these birds in their Western North American home territories, bring them east and sell them in the pet trade as caged birds.

Once word got around that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had arrested a pet shop owner for violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (it’s illegal to buy or sell native wild birds), other shop owners released their birds into the wild in order to avoid a similar fate. The finches have since spread all down the Eastern seaboard and westward until their range is now continent-wide (somehow the species also found its way to Hawaii). They were first documented nesting in South Carolina in the early ’80s.

Some of the folks who contacted me are concerned about the hummingbirds not being able to feed. The hummingbirds will feed when the finches aren’t feeding. Sometimes a territorial male hummer will attempt to chase the finches from “his” feeder, usually to no avail. There are commercially available hummer feeders that will only allow access to a hummer’s slender, elongated bill. As finches have a fairly strong bill adapted for cracking seeds, in their attempts to feed at a hummer feeder, they can pull off bee guards and plastic “flowers” around the feeder ports.

This story was originally published July 8, 2015 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Bird Notes | Finches move in on hummingbird feeder territory."