Day 19.103: Pine siskin

Last year, we bought a BirdWeather PUC and installed it on our deck to listen to and identify the birds it hears. It uses the same technology as the Merlin App. One of the birds it heard was the pine siskin, but although we looked among the winter-plumage goldfinches for a siskin imposter, we never saw one through the year.

I did manage to see (and photograph) a Eurasian siskin during our UK trip in March.

For a variety of reasons, the PUC was decommissioned for a while but we recently got it going again. And, once again, it was regularly identifying pine siskin calls. Today, our persistence paid off and - as we suspected - there among the American goldfinches was one of their streaky cousins.

On the life-list it goes.

The Latin name of the Eurasian siskin is Spinus spinus and the pine siskin's is Spinus pinus. I see what they did there. It's probably for the best if you pronounce it with a long-i like "pine" though.