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It’s a hungry Common Redpoll

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Photo by Don Waterhouse
Editor’s note: Thanks go to several of our readers who correctly identified this hungry bird at a feeder in New Sharon as a Common Redpoll (and not a purple finch). 

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  1. The bird identified as a purple finch is a male common redpoll, whose breeding zone is boreal tundra and scrub. We are in the midst of an irruption or that species along with goldfinches and pine siskins. All told, feeder providers are in for regular trips to the Farmers Union or elsewhere for sunflower chips and thistle seed, if they can afford the latter in sufficient quantities. We take part in the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s Feeder Watch, and on bird-counting days lately, we estimate about fifty siskins, an equal number of of goldfinches along with about thirty redpolls. There might be some hoary redpolls mixed with the others, but we haven’t spotted any.

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