Do birds such as the finch species travel for food?

[HanDiiMaNz]

In the winter that is, I was wondering whether tits and finches travel for their food in the winter? Because at the moment I have tits, dunnocks (in the caged feeder, is this strange?) and sparrows visiting the feeders but no finches whatsoever which I think is quite strange.


Thanks.

[aeshna5]

Many finches do travel a lot- we have many finches wintering here from further north such as Siskins, Redpolls, Chaffinches (some of our residents may be fairly sedentary) + many Linnets + Goldfinches that breed here head south in the autumn to France + Spain.

[teknomage]

I'm in mid-Wales & our siskins and goldfinches all vanish in the winter, I've no idea where they go - presumably somewhere warmer. From spring to late autumn we have masses of both flocking to our niger seed and sunflower heart feeders, but in the winter months none at all. I don't bother putting the niger seed feeder out in the winter as nothing else eats them. There always seem to be more bluetits around in the winter - but that might just be they can get a look in with the sunflower hearts with no siskins around.

Has anyone else noticed how aggressive siskins can be? Around here they bully the goldfinches and blue tits and chase them off the feeders whilst swearing at them! They also seem to squabble amongst themselves more than most of the other birds (although I've seen goldfinches squabbling noisily too).

tekno.mage

[valleyforge]

Hi HanDiiMaNz,

It's not unusual for finches to travel for food in the winter, the classic case being the brambling that overwinters here in the UK, having crossed the North Sea in great numbers from Scandinavia.

Bullfinches and Hawfinches are only very rare visitors here in our part of NE Scotland, so I imagine that they too are just in transit, looking for richer pickings.

We do have a resident population of chaffinches, greenfinches and siskins who don't seem to travel too far afield though, as some of the individuals are well known to us (e.g. the 'Pope' chaffinch who sports a white 'skullcap' ) and have been here a number of years, all year.

In response to teknomage, we certainly don't seem to have aggressive siskins here ... they're all pretty amiable really ... it's the greenfinches who tend to be the pugnatious ones, but usually only with other greenfinches ... they tend to ignore chaffinches, goldfinches or siskins even when they are sharing the same feeder.

So I'm guessing maybe the agressive behaviour your are observing is possibly something they have acquired/learned, rather than being inherent in the species.