Purple Finch

The Purple Finch is a stocky, big-headed finch whose common name is somewhat misleading; adult males are not truly purple but rather washed in a rich raspberry-red or wine color across the head, throat, back, and breast, blending into brown-streaked wings and a notched tail. The overall effect has been described as looking like a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.

Females and immature males lack any red and instead show a bold face pattern with a strong white eyebrow stripe and dark cheek patch on a heavily streaked brown-and-white body, a pattern quite different from the plainer-faced female House Finch.

Key field marks

• Male: raspberry-red wash over the head, breast, and back, with brown-streaked wings
• Female/immature: bold white eyebrow stripe and dark cheek patch on a streaked brown body
• Stout, conical bill and a distinctly notched tail
• Stockier and shorter-tailed than a House Finch, with a large-headed look

Similar species

• House Finch males show red concentrated on the head, throat, and rump with brown-streaked flanks, rather than an all-over raspberry wash, and females lack the Purple Finch's bold facial pattern.
• Cassin's Finch, found in western mountains, has a more sharply demarcated bright red cap and paler, less saturated body color; ranges overlap only in parts of the West.

Purple Finches breed across southern Canada, the Pacific Northwest, and the northeastern United States, in coniferous and mixed forests. In winter, the species is more widespread across the eastern and central US, becoming a familiar visitor to backyard feeders, though numbers vary considerably from year to year.

Migration is somewhat irregular, tied to seed crop abundance; in years of poor cone crops farther north, larger numbers move south, a pattern known as an irruption.

Purple Finches forage in trees and shrubs, often in small flocks outside the breeding season, eating tree seeds, buds, and berries, and readily visiting feeders stocked with sunflower seeds. During breeding season they also take more insects.

The song is a rich, rapid, warbling series of notes, often likened to a House Finch's song but more musical and less scratchy; the call note is a sharp, distinctive "pik" or "tick." Nests are cup-shaped, built by females on a horizontal branch of a conifer, usually well out from the trunk, with clutches typically of three to five pale blue-green eggs marked with dark spots.