Are they coming this winter? This question is on the minds of many birders with respect to the northern finches. Will high latitude species like common redpoll, pine grosbeaks and evening grosbeaks descend on Maine this winter? We know these irruptive species are perfectly capable of overwintering on their northern breeding grounds if the seeds, cones and fruits they depend on for food are adequate. However, in some years, seed and fruit production are poor and these northern finches are forced to move south for the winter, much to our delight.

Beginning in 1999, the late Ron Pittaway wrote a finch forecast every fall to predict the movements of the northern finches. That task has been assumed by Tyler Hoar. Tyler’s records of cone and fruit crops suggest it will be a poor irruption year for redpolls and crossbills. We may get a few pine grosbeaks and evening grosbeaks. Purple finches have already started to move south out of Canada.

For the northern finches that do appear, you will have a wonderful new field guide to increase your knowledge of those finches. The book is The Stokes Guide to Finches of the United States and Canada, authored by Lillian Stokes and Matthew Young. It is published by Little, Brown and Company.

Lillian, with her husband Donald, has written 35 photo-based field guides. The first was on eastern birds of North America. Others cover butterflies, dragonflies and damselflies, hummingbirds, winter ecology, bird behavior, and more. Lillian is a highly skilled nature photographer as well.

Matt Young is the founder of the Finch Research Network. Broadly interested in all finches, Matt has a particular interest in the vocalizations of the many ecotypes of red crossbills. He has worked for many years at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology on bird vocalizations and helped develop the Merlin app.

Common names of birds sometimes confuse us as far as their taxonomy is concerned. For instance, the rose-breasted grosbeak is in the cardinal family while the evening grosbeak is in the finch family. The famous Darwin’s finches are actually in the tanager family, not the finch family.

For this book, the authors restrict themselves to the family Fringillidae, which includes our familiar finches as well as 17 species of Hawaiian honeycreepers. The finches are arranged into three groups in this book: the 18 North American species, eight species of Eurasian vagrants, and the 17 Hawaiian honeycreeper species.

Each account begins with a lyrical Quick Take section, offering an overview of the species with delicious tidbits about the bird. Other sections are Identification (covering subspecies and similar species), Distribution, Language, Habitat, At Your Feeder, Movements and Irruptions, Breeding Behavior, and Conservation. Each account has at least half a dozen superb photographs, many taken by Lillian.

Our understanding of the taxonomy of groups of organisms is always changing. Between submission of the final copy for this book and its publication, the Check-list Committee of American Ornithologists Society decided to merge the two redpolls we have in North America, the common redpoll and the hoary redpoll. These morphs have their own species account. That’s not a big problem; the two morphs are identifiable in the field and have different behaviors. We just need to realize they are now a single species.

The book ends with general chapters on Feeding and Attracting Finches (include gardening tips), Movements and Irruptions and Research and Conservation. An extensive bibliography for each species concludes the book.

The Language section of each account is impressive, covering the calls and songs of each species in greater detail than in other field guides. The red crossbill section is particularly useful in presenting the call types of the eleven ecotypes of the species. Annual variation in use of various seed trees by each ecotype is shown in cleverly designed graphs.

I was particularly delighted by the coverage of the Cassia crossbill, a species recognized as a distinct species in 2017. Cassia crossbills occur on two sky islands in Idaho, the peaks of high mountains, so are isolated there. These crossbills have particularly large bills to allow them to extract cones from lodgepole pines and have unique vocalizations.

We have a local connection to this species. Patrick Keenan, Director of Outreach at the Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham, studied red crossbill vocalizations for his master’s degree at the University of Wyoming. His research was instrumental in building the case that Cassia’s crossbill should be split from red crossbill.

Herb Wilson taught ornithology and other biology courses at Colby College. He welcomes reader comments and questions at whwilson@colby.edu