House Finch in Madera Canyon

Madera Canyon is one of those places birders plan whole trips around. Elegant Trogons in the summer, hummingbirds by the dozen, and every so often a rarity shows up and half of southern Arizona drives down the Santa Ritas to see it. So naturally the photo I'm posting from March 21st is a House Finch (in my defense, he sat still and looked at the camera, which is more than I can say for most of the birds in that canyon).

He's a male, and a pretty well dressed one. The red runs across his forehead, back over the eye like a little eyebrow, and down through the throat and breast, then it fades into brown streaky flanks and a pale belly. That red comes from his diet. Male House Finches get their color from carotenoid pigments in what they eat, so a guy with a poorer menu can come out orange or even yellow. If you look at his upper breast there's a small orange-yellow patch, so he's not quite all in on red. Females tend to pick the redder males, which means he may want to eat a few more berries before things get serious this spring.

As for the photo, I like how clean it came out. He's perched on a thin bare twig that forks right under his feet, and you can see his toes wrapped around both pieces, which I didn't notice until I had it up on the big screen. The background went dark and soft, mostly greens and browns with nothing poking in to fight him for attention. He's sitting off to the right and facing left, so he has some room to look into. There's also a bit of something stuck to the tip of his beak, which I'm choosing to call evidence of lunch and not a flaw in the picture.

House Finches are native to the West and Mexico, and out here they're about as common as it gets. They're on the feeders, on the saguaros, and on the patio furniture if you let them. Back East they're newcomers, since the population there started from pet shop birds released on Long Island around 1940, when they were being sold as "Hollywood finches." Pretty good career move for a bird most of us out here walk right past.

Which is kind of why I wanted to post this one. It's easy to scroll past a House Finch because you saw six of them on the way to get coffee, but up close, with a decent background and a bird that holds still for once, he looks like he belongs in a canyon people drive a long way to visit.