Pine Siskin

Pine Siskins are year-round visitors to our backyard. In the summer they bring young to the feeders. This photo was taken on 13 July 2020. Pine Siskins breed in evergreen forests from Alaska across Canada, including the far North Woods of the eastern United States. They are also found in the Rocky Mountains south through Mexico to Guatemala. In the winter they spread out across almost all of our country, southern Canada and Mexico. Across this wide winter range, siskins tend to be of unpredictable occurrence and numbers They can be abundant one year but absent the next. They will even breed south of their normal breeding range after invasion years. Ornithologists assume this variation in distribution is caused by fluctuation in the seed numbers on which they feed (Dawson 2020).