Usually when I write about a bird species, the ladies don’t get a lot of love. It’s just that in the avian world, the boys have the bling and the girls are more focused on blending into their habitat to safely raise their chicks.
Occasionally, I get to appreciate a species where the males and females are pretty much identical, but it’s very rare for the ladies to have a beauty all their own.
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Which is why when I found the pine grosbeak, I had to share them with you.
These plump finches come in two color varieties, entirely based on gender. While both have a base of gray, the males have bright reddish-pink accents. The females have bright yellow-orange.
I just love that they get to shine all on their own merit.
You can find these beauties pretty much across all of Canada, nesting within the country’s many evergreen forests.
Their population also reaches down into the Rocky Mountains of the United States.
There is even a unique little pocket of them in the higher-elevation pine forests of the Sierra Nevada in California.
They eat mostly the buds, seeds, and fruits of many coniferous plants, supplementing their diets with small insects and spiders for protein.
In the winter, they will sometimes visit feeders and prefer ones containing black oil sunflower seeds or suet.
Pine grosbeak eggs are a pale blue with dark spotting and a mama bird will lay between two and six. She incubates them solo, but both parents will help raise the babies until they are ready to leave the nest.
