Burt and Tweets,

That's something I've always marveled at. In Michigan, we had a standard
feeder, filled with the usual sunflower seed/millet mix. Never had
goldfinches. Hung up a feeder filled with thistle seed, and within an hour
a goldfinch had found it. How do they know? By the way, the goldfinches
here don't seem to have quite the fondness for thistle that they did back
there - they seem just as likely to come to sunflower seed. More people
feed with the thistle back there, and they've been doing it longer, so have
the birds learned to identify the various thistle dispensers, and then
passed that skill to their young, training them by example?

Eric Kraig
Olympia, WA
mailto:kraige at oclc.org