Buckle Up, Birders—This Winter Is Looking Finchy

As the colder months approach, birders eagerly await the annual Winter Finch Forecast, hoping for predictions that beloved birds like redpolls, grosbeaks, and siskins will move south from North America’s boreal forest. This year, they’re in luck: The forecast says there’s potential for the finchiest winter since a so-called “superflight” five years ago.

Compiled each summer by biologist Tyler Hoar and hosted by the nonprofit Finch Research Network, the forecast predicts the winter movements of seven North American finches and three non-finch species. Hoar makes his projections based on the quantity of tree seeds and fruit available in the birds’ typical habitats—according to his own observations and those reported to him by a network of compilers—and on early reports of finch movements.

Some years the forecast reports a bounty of these foods and predicts that the birds will stay in their usual haunts. Last year’s extensive mountain-ash berry crop, for example, meant that fruit-loving Pine Grosbeaks and Bohemian Waxwings had no need to travel south. But in other years widespread crop failures force birds to seek food elsewhere—a phenomenon known as irruption.

This year’s data revealed poor seed and fruit crops in the boreal forest across eastern Canada and suggest that the birds will move in kind. Here are the species in flight and how you can find them.

Redpolls

Birders have had high hopes for a Redpoll irruption since a surprising late-August eBird report from upstate New York. While widespread reports haven’t yet borne that out, the forecast confirms their hunch, projecting a strong southbound Redpoll flight from the Great Lakes eastward through northern New York, New England, and Canada’s Maritime provinces. Making this flight likely are very poor crops of birch, alder, spruce, and tamarack in the eastern Arctic and boreal. This will be many birders’ first chance to see Redpolls since three former species, Common, Hoary, and Lesser, were lumped into a single species—simply called Redpoll—in 2024.

Eager birders should begin their Redpoll searches with weedy areas, from prairies to roadside ditches. But as winter wears on and snow covers these habitats, Redpolls could turn up at feeders, where they favor sunflower seeds and Nyjer seed, and at ornamental birches with seeds.

Redpolls were a biennial occurrence from the late 1990s through the early 2010s, says Finch Research Network president Matt Young, but their appearances have become more irregular since then. Climate change could be a culprit—less snow further north means the birds need not travel as far for food, even in irruption years. Hoar also suggests that birders watch the weather in the north, since bird movements could follow snow and freezing rain events.

Purple Finches, Evening Grosbeaks, and Pine Siskins

Boreal finch experts often group Purple Finches and Evening Grosbeaks together because both species love the spruce budworm, a native caterpillar that feeds on spruce and fir needles and whose populations fluctuate in 30- to 40-year cycles. A budworm outbreak is underway in Eastern North America, the largest in decades in some regions. But while budworms offer an easy food source to birds in summer, they become harder to access in winter as they lay dormant in the crevices of tree bark and branches. With other boreal food sources in short supply this fall, these species have begun moving south.

Reports from eBird already show Purple Finches moving southward into the United States from the eastern Great Plains to the North Carolina coast. The species looks similar to the House Finch, but adult males are raspberry-colored and streak-free, versus the streakier, slightly duller House Finch. Another ID tip: Female Purple Finches have two white stripes on their faces, which female House Finches lack. Purple Finches will feed on black oil sunflower seeds at feeders but also eat deciduous seeds like ash samaras.

The budworm outbreak has been a boon for the unmistakable Evening Grosbeak, which nonetheless is among the fastest declining land birds in North America. But with the eastern boreal forest seeing smaller-than-average crops of some of the grosbeak’s favored winter foods, including fruit from cherry and mountain-ash, the species could be on the move. Birders from southern Ontario east to the Maritime provinces, and from New York eastward through New England—along with higher-elevation areas of the mid-Atlantic—should seek these birds at feeders with black oil sunflower seeds or at seeding maples and ashes.   

Pine Siskins are more generalist feeders that don’t rely as heavily on the spruce budworm, but they have also started to move, likely reacting to poor white spruce and white birch crops in the boreal forest. Birders have already detected irrupting siskins at migration monitoring sites like Cape May in New Jersey, Turkey Point in Maryland, and Point Pelee in Ontario. Birders should look for these birds at small-coned trees like birch and white cedar or at feeders stocked with Nyjer and other small seeds.

Crossbills 

Both crossbill species that inhabit the North American boreal could move this winter but perhaps not in such high volume as the other species in the forecast. White-winged Crossbills bounce east and west across the boreal forest depending on food availability. This year they have headed west, where they’ll find large winter cone crops from Alaska through western Manitoba and southward. Smaller numbers remaining in the East might leave the boreal for New England or the areas surrounding the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, Red Crossbills east of the Great Lakes will likely enjoy a good crop from mixed conifer trees in their usual pine forest habitats, but might eventually move southward along the Atlantic Coast should that food run out.

Fruit eaters

Depleted stocks of mountain-ash berries should put good numbers of fruit-eating birds in motion this winter, the forecast predicts. Pine Grosbeaks and Bohemian Waxwings—the latter are not finches, but they are irruptive—could travel out of the boreal east of Lake Superior and into northern New England and the Maritime provinces. While Pine Grosbeaks will eat sunflower seeds, birders should look for both of these species at ornamental fruiting trees in winter—even in surprising places like main streets, schoolyards, and parking lots.

The other non-finches

The forecast tracks two other non-finch passerines, whose movements correlate, in part, with abundance of tree seeds in eastern North America’s forests. Birders have already spotted large flocks of Blue Jays at migration hotspots—they move in response to depleted stocks of deciduous tree seeds. Meanwhile, conifer-loving Red-breasted Nuthatches have been moving in large numbers since the summer, with birds already reaching the Gulf Coast.

It’s nice to have something to look forward to amid winter’s cold: All these beautiful birds bringing splashes of color to our local conifers, like nature’s own Christmas ornaments.

Science writer Ryan Mandelbaum is a board member of the Finch Research Network.