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Pine Grosbeak

Pine Grosbeak

Pinicola enucleator

Identify the Pine Grosbeak by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

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The Pine Grosbeak is a large, heavy-billed finch of the boreal conifer forests of North America, Fennoscandia and Siberia and the only member of its genus. Males are raspberry-red, females and young grey with yellow-orange tones, and all have two white wing bars. It usually stays near its breeding grounds, but when rowan crops fail in the north it can irrupt far south, often becoming strikingly tame.

Did you know?

  • During breeding both sexes develop throat pouches to carry seeds to their chicks.
  • Despite its name it lives more in spruce than in pine.

Voice

Call

About the species

Identification

A sturdy, long-tailed finch with a short, powerful bill whose upper edge curves slightly down at the tip. Males are raspberry-red with grey tones; females and young males are greyish with yellow-orange. All plumages show two white wing bars and pale-edged tertials. It is larger and longer-tailed than Bullfinch and, unlike crossbills, has an uncrossed bill.

Family

Fringillidae

Size

Medium (thrush)

Colours

red, grey, orange, black, white

About the habitat

Old, undisturbed boreal coniferous forest, especially with spruce, often mixed with birch and a berry-rich shrub layer; the nest is usually placed in a spruce 2–4 m above the ground. In winter also villages and towns with rowan trees.

Diet

Seeds, buds, shoots and berries, especially rowan, as well as lingonberries and bilberries; insects and spiders in summer, especially for the chicks.

Behaviour

Quiet and unobtrusive when breeding. Outside the breeding season it forms small flocks that feed deliberately in berry trees, even in towns, and are remarkably tame. In the breeding season both sexes develop throat pouches to carry food to the chicks. Its song is a soft, musical warble, and its call a clear, fluty whistle. Irruptions follow failures of the berry crop.

Sources

Photo: Вячеслав Юсупов, CC BY 4.0 https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/5938054483

Sound: Teet Sirotkin, XC1157228, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://xeno-canto.org/1157228

Text: Wikipedia (English) + FinBIF species descriptions + Wikipedia (Finnish) + GBIF regional observations + Wikipedia (Swedish), CC BY-SA 4.0; FinBIF: CC BY 4.0; Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0; GBIF occurrence data; Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_grosbeak

See also