Larger than Life.......

My first time of seeing goldfinches was when I was a seven year old kid down on the southern Iowa farm.  Areas of the farm were farmland and timber.  Some of the areas were probably prairie as they were fields of clay soil filled with rocks. It had never been plowed. My dad would later clear some of that land by picking up loads of rock that had been deposited by glaciers hundreds of years ago. We would take hay racks and throw rocks onto the flatbed from the soil all around the rack.  My dad didn’t get much crop from those fields but some corn was better to have than no corn at all from that field.

The wild flowers were weeds and the grasses were tall but they really were perfect for the goldfinches. They could fly about to  get insects and seeds. The side of a clay hill and I saw these bright yellow birds flying around darting back and forth.The yellow with black wings made me think they were parakeets.  I would never imagine that my house today has two pair of these birds raising  their young.