Even hanging upside-down from a Canada thistle and stuffing her beak with thistledown, the goldfinch never stops chittering.
American goldfinch
Ten percent of the tulip tree’s leaves have turned yellow in response to the drought. Goldfinches pass through like a yellow wind.
Half molted now, a patchwork of yellow and green, the goldfinch goes twittering past the crabapple’s half-open blooms.
Warmth without shadows, the gossip of goldfinches like a single bright thread. The rabbit doesn’t chance a dash across the yard.
The sound of an altercation among the goldfinches—like a dozen jazz soloists playing at once. The only cloud in the sky finds the sun.
Fog. High in a skeletal birch, the silhouettes of ten goldfinches are almost the right size for leaves, moving in their own slow wind.
A male and female goldfinch glean seeds from a tall bull thistle. She eats in silence while he in his loud yellow suit chatters on and on.
Goldfinches twitter in the tops of the locusts at sunrise, bright as beacons. A yellow hoverfly watches me from four inches away.
Goldfinch in the garden: a coneflower stem breaks under his weight and he moves to another, probing the dark centers for a hint of seed.
Incessant rain. A chitter of goldfinches halfway through their molt: part green, part yellow, like spicebush or forsythia in reverse.
That first snow still cloaks the frozen earth. When the wind dies, I can hear the 75 finches at my parents’ birdfeeder, a twittering bedlam.
A goldfinch gone green lands among walnut leaves that have gone yellow. Below, a juvenile red-bellied woodpecker, nape turning orange.
Overcast and quiet except for a red-eyed vireo and a male goldfinch, whose head is already beginning to turn green, like rusting bronze.
Scattered bird calls—cardinal, vireo, field sparrow—all sound perfunctory except for the goldfinches, who are in thistle heaven at last.