The Purple Finch Feeding Preferences

Purple finches rely mostly on seeds for their food. Their favorites are the sunflower seeds, seeds and buds from the elm tree, red maple, millet and thistle or nyjer. Thistle is a popular choice of finch birds especially the purple finch, gold finch and even mourning doves. Thistle or nyjer is a tiny black seed from India and Africa which can be found in most places that offer wild bird food. It has long been used in canary mixes but is now a common food source of wild birds.

These birds will also feed on fruits like raspberries and blackberries, the winged fruits of tulip trees, ash, sweetgum, ragweed, cocklebur, red cedar fruits, insects like beetles, birch and maple buds. Elm fruits and plump buds are abundant in summer while fruits from the tuliptree, maple and ash grow in fall. Apart from fruits, they also eat insects and seeds during the summer and berries of evergreen in winter.

Purple finches can also feed on hophornbeam seeds from the eastern hophornbeam trees although these are not their preferred food. The trees have thin, leafless branches from which light-brown fruiting clusters grow. The clusters have several flattened, papery bladders and inside them is a ¼-inch long seed the size of a small grain of brown rice.