A Company of Hawfinches

On the old cherry tree we hang many birdfeeders the year round. The staple food is sunflower seeds with peanuts (difficult to obtain here in France) and fatballs.

They attract many different birds - all the tits: blue, great, coal and long-tailed; nuthatches, chaffinch and greenfinch and treecreepers. Many of the sunflower seeds fall to the ground, where they attract, in the winter, siskins and serins, bramblings and goldfinches; sometimes there are 75 to 100 birds foraging on the ground.

Early this year we were delighted to see first one then two pairs of hawfinches as regular visitors to both the feeders and the ground beneath. Very well turned-out birds; to us, they give the impression of having just left the hairdressers, with not a stray wisp or feather out of place. Both pairs are frequently seen on the tops of the high oaks in the garden, their size (for a finch) and enormous beaks help identify them.

This morning, Jo, my wife, called out to look under the bird feeders, where there were at least 20 hawfinches eating the sunflower seeds!

All the information we could find suggests that hawfinches are shy and difficult to see; one of the websites did suggest that as well as birds that stay in one locality, other hawfinches migrate south from north and east europe in winter and back again in spring.

We assume our company of hawfinches was a party moving back to north and east Europe.