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Evening Grosbeak | Hesperiphona vespertina
Avonddikbek | Picogordo vespertino
The Evening Grosbeak is a heavy finch of northern and western conifer forest, with a massive pale green bill and a black, white and yellow pattern. It appears in flocks, sometimes hundreds of kilometres outside the breeding range, and has lost more than half its numbers in half a century.
Voice
There is no true song. The contact note is a hard, penetrating cheep or clee-er, similar in tone to a House Sparrow but far louder, and a flock in flight gives it continuously. A short dry trill is also heard. Work on the flight call has shown five distinct call types in North America, each with its own range; they can be separated on a sonogram and in the field only with much practice.
Recording: Valerie Heemstra — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Ensign Township (near Rapid River), Delta County, Michigan, United States · xeno-canto
Identification
A compact, large-headed finch of almost oriole size, with a short tail and a conical bill that is pale yellow-green in spring and paler, whiter in winter. The male has a dark brown head with a broad yellow brow band running across the forehead, a yellow belly and rump, and black wings with a large white panel on the inner wing. The female is olive-grey with a yellow wash on the neck, black-and-white wing markings and a pale, dark-streaked throat. The flight is undulating and the flock stays tightly together.
Confusion species
Pine Grosbeak is as heavy but red or yellow-green, with a hooked dark bill and two narrow white wingbars instead of one large white panel. American Goldfinch and Pine Siskin are much smaller and thin-billed. In Mexico Black-headed Grosbeak can cause confusion: it is orange-buff on the breast, has a heavy two-toned bill and lacks both the yellow forehead band and the large white wing panel.
Habitat
Mature, tall conifer and mixed forest of the boreal zone and the mountains, favouring spruce, fir and adjoining maple and ash stands. Outside the breeding season it comes to deciduous woodland, village edges and gardens with feeders, where it cracks sunflower seeds. In the west and in Mexico it is a bird of montane pine-oak forest, well above two thousand metres.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
The range runs from British Columbia and southern Yukon through the boreal forest of Canada to Nova Scotia and New England, and south through the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada and the Mexican ranges into the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Movement is irregular and tied to the seed crop: in irruption years flocks reach the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic states, while in other winters the same area stays empty. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the species spread eastward, probably helped by planted box elder and by feeders; that expansion has since partly reversed.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Listen first and look second: the sharp call of a flock overhead gives the species away before you see it. In the east a winter with a heavy maple and ash seed crop offers the best chance, and a sunflower feeder in northern Minnesota or Ontario often draws flocks of tens of birds.
Conservation
The species is listed as Vulnerable (VU). The Breeding Bird Survey indicates a decline of about 84 per cent between 1966 and 2023, and American and Canadian organisations treat it as a tipping-point species that has lost more than half its population in fifty years. Causes named include logging of boreal forest, control of spruce budworm outbreaks — an important prey in the breeding season — disease spread at feeders, collisions with vehicles at road salt and strikes against windows.
Scientific name
Hesperiphona vespertina | (Cooper, 1825)
William Cooper described the species in 1825 as Fringilla vespertina, from a specimen collected by Henry Schoolcraft near Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; because it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Hesperiphona was introduced in 1850 by Charles Lucien Bonaparte, from Greek hesperos 'evening' and phone 'voice'. The species name vespertina is Latin for 'of the evening'; both names rest on the mistaken belief that the bird only called towards dusk.