Arkansas Goldfinch

Reliable water supplies and tubes of thistleseed make suburban Tucson a paradise for Lesser Goldfinches. They’re especially conspicuous right now, many pairs in vehement courtship even as others are already bringing their fuzzy fledglings to the buffet.

Here in the desert southwest, our birds are almost all green-backed, but you don’t have to go far to enter the broad swath of their range in which hesperophila intergrades with the more easterly psaltria, the “Arkansas” Goldfinch. Named for the river, not for the state,  Arkansas Goldfinches are black-backed, and the dark crown–a neat little skullcap in western, green-backed birds–comes down onto the auriculars, making them look a little bit sinister as they bear down on the niger feeders.

I see a couple of black-backed birds on almost every visit to the Chiricahuas, but they are rarish as far northwest as Tucson. The one that visited our feeders yesterday may well be the only one we see this spring.

As this close look reveals, the bird isn’t even truly black-backed: there’s a lot of green smudging in that sooty mantle, suggesting that this individual is, as expected, an intergrade between “our” green-backed birds and the black-backed goldfinches of Colorado and Texas.