What looks like a male and female Purple Finch, in a flock of a half-dozen birds, on Orcas Island on 6 September 2019 isn’t necessarily so. The “female”-plumaged bird could well be a first or second-year male. Purple Finches may even breed in this drab plumage, although less regularly than do the older, purple males. Purple Finches were fairly common this spring in our forest in Olympia and we banded a few at our feeders. Curiously, we never saw a purple male in Olympia. I don’t have a ready hypothesis for this apparent absence.
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