how to attract american goldfinches
- Garden-Green
- Aug 6
- 3 min read
With their striking yellow feathers and sweet songs, American Goldfinches (Spinus tristis) favor areas with a steady seed supply. Unlike many other native songbirds who include many insects in their diet (especially when feeding their young), goldfinches (and their nestlings) prefer a mostly seed diet—and even breed later in the summer than other birds when the seeds ripen. They eat buds, berries, occasionally insects, and lots of seeds. They are fond of seeds from the Asteraceae family, such as sunflowers, coneflowers, asters, and especially thistles, which also provide down for nests.
Note: Invasive thistles have displaced our native ones. Plant some of our tall, non-aggressive native thistles like Tall Thistle (Cirsium altissimum), Field Thistle (Cirsium discolor), and Swamp Thistle (Cirsium muticum) in the back of a border or the middle of a bed in the backyard. They’e biennials, flowering the second year, and will need to be replaced if they don’t self-seed. Collect the seed and plant in the fall for a steady supply.
The female builds a tightly woven, cup-shaped nest high in a shrub or low in a tree and lays 2–7 eggs that are white–pale blue, sometimes with light brown spots. The male feeds her and later helps feed the nestlings. If a Brown-Headed Cowbird lays an egg in the nest, that nestling doesn’t survive long on a seed-heavy diet.
All goldfinches molt after breeding season, and the males replace their bright yellow feathers with duller ones that resemble females and juveniles. They gather in small flocks or larger, mixed-species flocks until the next spring, when they molt again, and the males once again produce their breeding feathers.
American Goldfinches are a beautiful sight—and not only do they brighten up our gardens, but they also add cheerful melodies, singing as they dip and rise in flight.
Although the goldfinch population is considered stable (not in widespread decline), the National Audubon Society says they may have declined recently in some areas, and Cornell Lab’s All About Birds website says their numbers have decreased by 27% from 1966 to 2019.
Here’s how to attract goldfinches:
1. Provide food.
Northern goldfinches may migrate long distances south in the fall, but most goldfinches are year-round residents who feed on seed heads and often visit bird feeders. So plant native trees, shrubs, flowers, and grasses to provide seeds, especially flowers in the Aster family), leave seed heads on flowers in the fall through the winter, and supplement in winter with regularly cleaned feeders stocked with sunflower seeds (or try Nyger, a thistle seed from Ethiopia and Asia). Here’s a sample of native flowers and grasses that goldfinches love:
Tall Thistle (Cirsium altissimum)
Field Thistle (Cirsium discolor)
Swamp Thistle (Cirsium muticum)
Lanceleaf Coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata)
Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum)
Common Sunflower (Helianthus annuus)
Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta)
Tall Ironweed (Vernonia gigantea)
Sweet Joe Pye (Eutrochium purpureum)
Aromatic Aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium)
Showy Goldenrod (Solidago speciosa)
Dense Blazing Star (Liatris spicata)
Culver’s Root (Veronicastrum virginicum)
Wild Bergamot/Bee Balm (Monarda fistulosa)
Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata)
Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum)
Sideoats Grama (Bouteloua curtipendula)
Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum)
Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium)
Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)
Zinnia (Zinnia elegans—annual native to Mexico)
2. Provide water.
Goldfinches like to nest near water. If there’s no water source in your yard, provide it in a birdbath that’s regularly cleaned and filled. They also enjoy drinking out of teacup saucers and “ant moats”/“ant guards” hung above hummingbird feeders.
3. Provide cover and nesting sites.
Reduce your lawn and grow more native flowers, shrubs, and trees.
4. Provide protection.
Keep cats indoors, put decals on windows to prevent collisions, and avoid spraying pesticides, including mosquito sprays and herbicides, in your yard.
Sources
Birds & Blooms Backyard Bird Field Guide. RDA Enthusiast Brands LLC and Trusted Media Brands, Inc.: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 2019.
Bull, John and John Farrand, Jr. National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds. Eastern Region. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: New York, NY.
1995.
Kricher, John. A Field Guide to Eastern Forests. The Peterson Field Guide Series®. Houghton Mifflin company: New York, NY. 1998.
Peterson, Roger Tory. A Field Guide to the Birds. Giving Field Marks of all Species Found East of the Rockies. National Audubon Society and Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, MA. 1947.
Stokes, Donald W. A Guide to Nature in Winter. Northeast and North Central North America. Stokes Nature Guide. Little, Brown and Company. 1976.
https://abcbirds.org/bird/american-goldfinch/
www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Goldfinch/
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