Golfinches have landed!
Jess is in the Garden
Posts: 1,022
After almost a year of virtually no activity with my bird feeder, I was positively delighted when TEN (yes 10!) goldfinches started using it a couple of weeks back.
Now it's a constant food fest up there - along with a few coal tits, some blue tits and the odd blackbird/robin/wood pigeon that hoover up what ends up in the flower bed beneath 
It has been pure joy for me and my little girl, aged 6, to sit at the kitchen window and watch them all.
I've been using 'no mess' sunflower hearts - all the birds soon to love them - but after doing a bit of research and reading that goldfinches' natural food is seed, I was wondering if there is a particular kind they prefer or that is better for them, as they are the ones feeding from my garden the most - messy too - they scatter the husk less seeds everywhere!
Thanks
Posts
Goldfinches love Nyger seed which is very fine and needs a special feeder with small holes. It's lovely to hear that you have been 'discovered' by the birds and are having an enjoyable time watching them with your daughter
Thanks Lesley! It really has been amazing to watch them. And when I'm in the garden, they all stop, cock their heads to one side and cheep at me, but without flying off, as they used to. Seems they are getting used to me
Off to google Nyger seed...
Goldfinches are supposed to love Nyger seed, but whenever I've supplied it to them in the special feeders they've studiously ignored it and tucked into the sunflower hearts - they get through huge amounts of them - both in this garden and in the gardens at my former place of work. Eventually I stopped offering them Nyger seed as it just went mouldy in the feeders and I had to keep throwing it away.
I find that if they do drop any of the sunflower hearts the blackbirds hoover them up, and in the summer and autumn the hedgehogs do too.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Yes, the blackbirds, robins and odd word pigeon have been doing a grand job getting rid of the fallout.
Interesting how they go for sunflower hearts over all else - I wonder if that's because they are meant to be the rolls royce of seeds and require no work either. Plus they get more in one beakful!
Thanks pansy - the sunflower hearts I give them are no-mess, husk less ones and even so, they make quite a mess...but other birds eat the rest, so its fine.
Good analogy by the way
Funnily enough, the goldfinches visiting us don't squabble or flee - they sit for up to a minute a a time, on the wire surrounding perch and eat fairly methodically until they are fit to burst, it seems!
I offer both nyger seed and sunflower hearts, and the goldfinches will go for the sunflower hearts first. They sit on the feeder and nibble away at a heart in their beaks until they have skinned it, maybe the skin is the mess you are seeing,Jess. I'll continue to offer nyger seed, because it is supposed to be their 'special' food (or is that just sales talk to offset the high price?
), but I like the sunflower hearts because ALL of the birds visiting eat them. Even the jay makes a lightning swoop at the feeder to grab some.
Jess, plant some Verbena Bonariensis. Goldfinches love them.
I had my daughter here for the weekend and she loved all the birds at the feeders by the breakfast room door. I kept saying I was hoping she'd see the goldfinces ( you never seem to see on its own ) they duly arrived. She'd never seen them before
1 of 7- I suspect your suspicion about extortionate price hoiking is accurate- otherwise know as Ooh Here's A Gullible Gardener Who Loves Birds Let's Lure Them Into Thinking These Wild Birds Need Special Seed