House finches are a very common bird in urban and suburban areas here.  As befits the name house finch.  I suppose they may breed in rafters; I wouldn’t know.  I do know they don’t belong here.  There are closely related indigenous finches that are surely being hedged out by them.  House finches are boring LBBs.  Some are streaky (females? juveniles?), some are just beige, but they have a kind of red that magically appears when the sun comes out.  Sometimes kinda pretty.  More noteworthy is their elaborate song, which is nice to hear, since the other common perching bird in their territory is the much less musical house sparrow.

Let’s talk about places.

Mexico?  Some animals that are out of balance with nature spread naturally with the increase of human populations, like coyotes and anna’s hummingbirds and opossums.  Some are actively imported, like house sparrows and starlings were to the US.  I feel like I’ve read that house finches in america were descended from pet bird trade, but I think they’re from Mexico?  So they could’ve just gradually moved north, being better adapted to city life than their cousins.

Seattle.  The first place I took note of these birds was in downtown Seattle, near the Cornish* campus on the edge of the South Lake Union neighborhood.  I saw and mostly heard a flock in the little trees down there, making the world sound a little nicer.

Federal Way.  We tried feeding birds on our balcony for a while.  The house finches had an interesting behavior that set them apart from the rest.  Whenever my husband sneezed, even from indoors on the other side of a pane of glass, they’d get scared into flying off.  They’d come right back, but it was a level of caution that even smaller birds like chickadees didn’t bother with.

Auburn.  My current employer used to have a cool building in Auburn, not far from the railroad tracks, surrounded by big fields, edged with some nice tall trees.  Goodbye wildlife, they moved.  On the old campus, there were some disused buildings that served as nesting grounds for a lot of birds, and I think primarily for house finches.  For the moment, the current owners of those buildings haven’t torn them down, and I suspect that when you see house finches at the mall, they were born and bred next to my old call center.

They’re a common bird where I live now, though I think they don’t come down to the ground level in my cul-de-sac as much as others.  I usually just hear the song or see them fly between trees.  I don’t think much about them, but they’re fine.  Bird it up, homies.

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*Cornish College of the Arts has waxed and waned over the years.  Early this millennium, they worked hard to get accreditation, and build up their program.  But they’ve always been primarily a dumping ground for the rich kids that were too indolent to be business majors, and the bullshit student body conspired with the bullshit administration and the bullshit rich donors to squander that work, the graduating class dwindling from dozens to a handful, in the space of ten years, the classes going from at least half-assed intellectual fare down to “finger-painting, if you feel like it today.”  They were recently acquired by a better university, and they fucking deserved it.