The goldfinch is one of America’s prettiest songbirds. It is about five inches long and is found over most of the United States and southern Canada.
The male is an exceptionally handsome little bird. In the spring and summer he wears bright yellow feathers with a contrasting jet-black cap, wings and tail feathers with pretty white wing stripes. His legs and short, sharp beak are orange-brown. But in the fall and winter his bright yellow body changes to look more like the olive-brown female.
Goldfinches’ nests are made of thistledown and fibers from various plants glued together with spider web, and they are woven so tightly that the nests will temporarily hold water. The female usually lays five pale blue eggs from July through September. These hatch out as cute baby chicks after about 12 days. While the mothers incubate the eggs, their mates faithfully bring them seeds.
Once the eggs hatch, the nestlings will leave the nest in only about 12 days, but they will need their parents to feed them for three more weeks. Baby goldfinches cannot digest whole seeds. Until they are older, the parents feed them by first eating and partially digesting the seeds in a pouch in their throat called the crop. They feed the little ones this partially digested food.
The Creator has made the goldfinch a seed-eater rather than an insect-eater. In His wisdom, He arranged for their young to hatch in the late summer, just as seeds are ripening and are easy to find. Thistle seeds are their favorite, and climbing on the prickly thistle plant does not seem to bother them. There is a variety of other food they enjoy, including ripe berries and the seeds of grass, weeds, milkweed and maple sap. There is an interesting advantage to this vegetarian diet. Cowbirds, who like to lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, also use goldfinch nests. But cowbird babies can’t survive on the goldfinch’s vegetarian diet. So, the baby goldfinches keep growing while the cowbird dies, unlike what normally happens with this parasite bird.
We can learn a good lesson from the goldfinch. The diet of this bird feeds the right babies in its nests. We can grow as Christians only as we feed the new nature we have been given by feeding our minds and hearts on the Bible and other things that teach us more about the Lord Jesus and the truth found in the Bible. The old nature loves a different kind of “food.” It depends on what we take into our hearts through our ears, eyes and minds, which nature will grow stronger. Like our opening verse says, we are not to let the old, sinful nature rule us.
Did You Know?
Goldfinches are seed-eaters rather than insect-eaters.
Messages of God’s Love 6/23/2024