How to attract goldfinches to your garden

These brightly coloured birds with their distinctive red face and golden wing bars are easy to attract to our gardens providing we offer the right food and plants.

Offering supplementary feed

With their sharp, pointed beaks, goldfinches are experts at removing tiny seeds from plants such as thistles and teasels, but they are equally enticed by a bit of supplementary food from a feeder.

Goldfinches love nyjer seeds, fine seed blends and sunflower hearts, so making them available in different areas of the garden is a great idea. Remember to put each feed type in their specific feeder for safety and to prevent wastage.

Cautious at first, it can take goldfinches a few weeks to grow accustomed to a new feeder, but once their confidence has grown, they will often return daily. Late summer and winter are prime times for spotting them and you will usually hear their tinkling call before you actually see them.

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Create a feeding haven

Goldfinches often feed in small flocks known as charms, clinging acrobatically to seed heads as they extract the tiniest of seeds. If you have an area of the garden you can leave a little wild, so much the better. Grow teasel, thistle, knapweed, cornflower, sunflower and sedum to set little hearts a flutter. Then, when the flowers die back, leave seed heads standing through autumn and winter to provide much-needed nutrition boost when nature’s larder begins to run dry.

Water and shelter

Seeds can be quite dry, so clean, fresh water is essential for helping goldfinches to remain hydrated. Hang a drinker from your feeding station, fill a bird bath or put out a shallow dish for drinking and bathing.

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Habitats to thrive in

Goldfinches can be found in most of the UK and they do extremely well in gardens, orchards, farmland edges, parks and scrubland – anywhere where there are plenty of tasty seeds. Numbers have increased significantly since the 1970s, helped partly by garden feeding.

Keeping it clean

Caring for our garden birds comes with its responsibilities and most importantly the need to keep everything scrupulously clean to help reduce the spread of disease such as trichomonosis. Always dismantle your feeders and wash and treat with a hygiene spray on a regular basis. The same should be done for all water dishes, baths and drinkers.

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