← Field Guide

American Goldfinch

Spinus tristis
AMGO · Fringillidae · Finches, Euphonias, and Allies
Grassland provisional · from species
13heard

The American goldfinch (Spinus tristis) is a small North American bird in the finch family. It is migratory, ranging from mid-Alberta to North Carolina during the breeding season, and from just south of the Canada–United States border to Mexico during the winter. The only finch in its subfamily to undergo a complete molt, the American goldfinch displays sexual dichromatism: the male is a vibrant yellow in the summer and an olive color during the winter, while the female is a dull yellow-brown shade which brightens…

Wikipedia ↗
mean confidence
8–9 in wingspanestimated

Wingspan and trait data: Fox et al. (2026), CC BY 4.0; incorporating AVONET (Tobias et al. 2022) and BirdWingData (Shiomi et al. 2025)

American Goldfinch
13Detections
10Days heard
0.65Mean confidence
7 AugFirst heard
27 SepLast heard
11,611Stations worldwide

By hour of day

00061218

Counts reflect vocal activity and ambient noise, not abundance.

Recent days

7 Aug 27 Sep

Daily counts. Seasonal bars replace this once there is a year of records to draw them from.

Where heard

At home13 detections
On outings0 detections

Home and away are counted separately everywhere except here.

Where it lives

Breeding and resident range, from BirdWeather. Not where you have heard it — that is the map on the Outings page.

Leaflet · CARTO · range polygons from BirdWeather

Recordings

Highest-confidence detections first. Confidence is a threshold, not a probability of being correct.

2026-09-07 10:06
9 s
0.96
2026-09-04 08:11
9 s
0.80
2026-09-07 10:05
9 s
0.78
2026-09-24 21:17
9 s
0.73
2026-09-27 12:59
9 s
0.66
2026-09-10 07:06
9 s
0.65
2026-08-09 19:24
9 s
0.62
2026-08-08 07:43
9 s
0.59
2026-08-29 09:07
9 s
0.56
2026-08-10 07:00
9 s
0.55
2026-08-07 15:13
9 s
0.54
2026-09-07 10:05
9 s
0.53
Station PUC-29278 on BirdWeather Data updated 28 Sep, 11:45am Archive