290 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 paRT i 



CARPODAGUS MEXICANUS FRONTALIS (Say) 



House Finch 



PLATE 17 



Contributed by Robert S. Woods 



Habits 



The house finch, more familiarly known as the hnnet, is a species 

 whose repute varies according to the interests and point of view of 

 those who regard it. To the average city dweller, its domestic tastes, 

 cheerful song, amiable manner, and the bright coloring of the male 

 make it a pleasing adjunct to the dooryard or window sill; but a grower 

 of the softer varieties of fruit who watches flocks of these birds descend 

 like locusts upon his ripening crop finds difliculty in appreciating 

 their esthetic values. Because of these destructive tendencies, the 

 house finch has long been denied the protection of the law in Cali- 

 fornia, at least, but nevertheless continues to be the most abundant 

 species of bird throughout much of its range, which consists in general 

 of the Upper and Lower Sonoran Zones of the Pacific and southwestern 

 States, together with Mexico. 



Most numerous about towns and cultivated lands, this species is by 

 no means a stranger to uninhabited wastes and deserts. However, 

 competent observers agree that the sight of a house finch is one of the 

 surest signs that water is near; hence the linnet cannot be considered a 

 characteristic or generally distributed bird of the desert regions. In 

 California and New Mexico the species is reported to breed at alti- 

 tudes as high as 8,000 feet, but in California, at least, the mountains 

 are not a favored habitat, and it is not among the birds that one 

 ordinarily expects to encounter in the higher country. In the United 

 States its centers of greatest abundance are the valleys of the Pacific 

 slope of central and southern California, but its natural range extends 

 north to Washington and east into Wyoming, Colorado, and western 

 Texas. 



In recent years extensions of territory have occurred. Ralph C. 

 Tate (1925) reported an apparently permanent incursion into the Okla- 

 homa Panhandle, approximately 40 miles southeast of the border of 

 the previously known breeding range. Ian McTaggart Cowan (1937) 

 found a pair nesting at Victoria, British Columbia, in 1937, and stated 

 that the species had been noted as a regular breeding resident in the 

 interior of the same province for the previous 3 or 4 years. Most 

 striking was the establishment in the early 1940's of a population of 

 house finches on the eastern seaboard. As Austin (1961) describes it: 

 "In 1940 cage-bird dealers in southern California shipped numbers 

 of these birds, caught illegally in the wild, to New York dealers for 



