For the Birds: Pigs CAN Fly Really!

Pine Siskin Here's looking at you kid
Photo by Chris Southwick

By Christine Southwick

Do you have birds that are brown with yellow patches and needle-like bills fighting and darting around each other for spaces at your feeders while you hear a rising “zhreeeee” sound? 

Are you filling your feeders daily because of their vociferous appetites? If so, you know why Pine Siskin are often called Pig Siskins.

These noisy, flashy little finches often appear in our winters in flocks from four to eighty-four. 

You might have Pine Siskin at other seasons too since these finches are nomadic, meaning that they don’t have a set migration. 

Pine Siskin flock
Photo by Chris Southwick

Instead, they follow their food sources, and in years that their preferred food of evergreen cone seeds is low, they fly searching until they find suitable substitutes— evergreens with cones, shrubby thickets with seeds or berries, un-mowed grassy fields, and especially bird feeders. 

Their bills have evolved to a narrow pointy shape that enables them to extract cone seeds and other small seeds.

Pine Siskin are usually found in the tip-tops of seed-bearing trees, often hanging upside-down while extracting their favorite seeds out of hanging cones. 

Pine Siskin presumed male by amount of yellow
Photo by Chris Southwick

They also eat alder seeds and can be found in mixed forests here. These feisty birds keep trees healthy by gleaning spiders, insects and grubs found on branches, and on/in leaves. 

During the winter, they are often on the ground looking for these delicacies.

Pine Siskin are gregarious finches that stay in flocks continually making contact calls. 

They usually nest close to each other in loose colonies, high up in trees, in the boreal forests in Canada. 

Females build the highly insulated nests and hide them under an overhanging branch. 

The females keep the eggs warm continuously while being fed by their monogamous mates.

Pine Siskin on left House Finch on right by
Photo by Chris Southwick

Pine Siskin can stay warm in extreme cold by raising their metabolic rate, something that few other birds can do. 

And when they store seeds in their crop (pouch area all birds have in front of their throat) they can eat a few seeds at a time as fuel for five to six hours of heat during sub-zero nights.

They gladly eat black-oil sunflower seeds, and in cold weather may crowd feeders. 

Keep clean water in liquid form for their drinking and bathing needs, and clean under your feeders routinely.