Greenfinch

Look for the yellow. A Greenfinch is a chunky finch with a big, pale, cone-shaped bill, and whether it is sitting or flying it shows a bright yellow stripe along the edge of the wing and yellow patches at the sides of its short, forked tail.

The male is olive-green all over, yellowish on the breast and belly and brighter yellow-green on the rump, with a grey panel in the wing and a little black between the bill and the eye. In winter he looks duller and browner. The bill is pinkish and the legs pale brown to pinkish.¹

It is about 15 cm long with a wingspan of 26 cm.² Live adults weighed by BTO ringers average 27.7 g, males and females much the same.³

Despite the name, a female Greenfinch looks more brown than green: greyer on the head and back, with less yellow in the wing and tail than the male and white under the tail. Her bill is greyer than his.

Young birds, seen from late spring, look like a female but are buffish-brown and streaked on the breast and flanks, with only thin yellow edges in the wing. Photos and how to tell them apart: female and young Greenfinches.

The bird most often confused with it is the Siskin. A Siskin is smaller, 12 cm against 15, streaked, with a fine, sharp bill, and the male has a black cap and bib. A Greenfinch is bigger, plainer and heavy-billed. See Siskin or Greenfinch.

A young Goldfinch is streaky brown like a young Greenfinch, but it already has the adult's yellow wing patch on black wings, and white spots on its black tail.⁴ A male Yellowhammer has a much yellower head, a brown back streaked with black, a chestnut rump and white sides to the tail. A female House Sparrow has a pale stripe behind the eye, a striped back and no yellow at all.

In spring the male sings from a treetop or another high perch: a twittering, trilling song broken by a long, drawn-out nasal wheeze. Sometimes he sings in a slow, rolling song flight over the trees on stiff wings.

The full song mixes call notes, a dry nasal trill, a rolling run of notes that rises and speeds up, and the wheeze, written tsweee. Males sing from January, sometimes late December, to mid-August; females sing too, but much less often and more weakly.

The calls to know are a fast, twittering contact call, used to keep in touch, and a plaintive, rising alarm call. Young birds begging for food give soft, high notes. Hear the song, the wheeze and the calls: Greenfinch song and calls.

Greenfinches live throughout Britain and Ireland all year, everywhere except the highest hills, and are most at home around people: in BTO surveys they turn up most often in villages, and commonly in towns. In the last national atlas they bred in 90% of the UK's 10-km squares.

Away from houses, look along woodland edges, in hedgerows, parks, orchards and churchyards. In autumn and winter they feed in flocks on stubbles and weedy fields, often with Linnets, Tree Sparrows, Yellowhammers and Reed Buntings.

In spring, listen for the wheeze and look up to the top of a tall tree or another high perch. When a Greenfinch flies off, watch for the yellow flashing in the wings and tail. In winter, check hedges and shrubs near a garden feeder.

British Greenfinches mostly stay put. Ringing shows most move no more than about 70 km, females further than males and young birds further than adults, often towards lowland and the coast.

Some come from abroad. Each winter, small numbers of Greenfinches from Fennoscandia, mostly from its western side such as Norway, add to our birds. BTO ringing records include 121 reports of Norwegian-ringed Greenfinches here, and one young male ringed at Mandal in southern Norway on 1 November 1997 was caught at Kilnsea, East Yorkshire, two days later, 667 km away.⁵

Seeds, above all. A Greenfinch's heavy bill is built for big seeds, and a classic study of British finches found it lives mainly on the large seeds of trees, crops and farmland weeds.⁶ It also eats buds, flowers and berries, and some insects and spiders. It has a neat trick with bramble and yew berries: it squeezes the fruit in its bill, drops the pulp and keeps the seeds.

What the chicks eat is less settled. Birds of the World describes them as fed mostly on insect larvae, but a study of nestlings in Spain found mainly seeds, leaves and bulbs, with only a few aphids early in the season.⁷ Some finches are known to raise their young almost entirely on seeds, carried in the throat and brought up for the chicks. More: what Greenfinches eat.

Greenfinches readily take sunflower seeds, black seeds or hearts, from a hanging feeder, and peanuts too. They are bold at feeders and squabble with each other and with other birds.

Because of the disease that has hit Greenfinches, how you feed matters. The RSPB now advises putting out seed and peanuts only from November to April and pausing from 1 May to 31 October, using hanging feeders rather than bird tables, trays or window feeders, cleaning feeders and water every week, and only offering water you can change every day.⁸ More: feeding Greenfinches safely.

The female builds the nest, a neat cup of twigs, grass and moss with hair and feathers, usually in a dense bush, hedge or conifer. Greenfinches do not hold territories: some pairs nest alone, others in loose groups, with nests sometimes as little as 1.5 m apart.

In Britain the first eggs are laid on 10 May on average, in a season that runs from April into August. She lays 4 or 5 eggs and incubates them for about 14 days, while the male brings her food. The chicks leave the nest at 13.5 to 16 days old, and most pairs raise two broods.³ More: Greenfinch nests, eggs and young.

Greenfinches are sociable outside the breeding season. Late in summer they gather in flocks that can reach several thousand, and they are acrobatic feeders, hanging upside down on seed heads and feeders and sometimes holding a seed head under one foot to get at the seeds.

Before roosting, a Greenfinch fills its gullet with food to see it through the night: up to 2.5 cubic centimetres.

A Greenfinch that survives to breed typically lives about 2 years. In BTO ringing data, about 44% of adults survive from one year to the next, and 42% of young birds survive their first year. They breed in their first year.³

The oldest ringed Greenfinch in Britain and Ireland lived 11 years, 3 months and 24 days. It was ringed as a young male at Ormesby, Middlesbrough, in January 1987, and caught again by a ringer in Surrey in May 1998, 366 km to the south.⁹ The European list of ringing records includes a Portuguese-ringed bird found dead at 12 years and 5 months.¹⁰

Many nests fail. In a British sample of 1,589 eggs, 68.6% hatched and 52.9% produced young that left the nest. Cats, rodents, crows, gulls, people and bad weather all took their toll.

The Greenfinch is on the UK Red List. Its breeding population has fallen by 66% since 1967, and there were about 785,000 pairs in 2016.³ In the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch it was the seventh most-seen bird in 1979; in 2026 it was eighteenth. Worldwide it is still of Least Concern.

Numbers rose through the 1990s. Then, in 2005, a disease called trichomonosis, caused by a microscopic parasite, jumped into British finches, probably from pigeons and doves. It damages the throat so birds struggle to swallow, and it spreads where birds share food and water. By 2007, breeding Greenfinches had fallen by 35% in the region where the disease was worst, and more than half a million Greenfinches and Chaffinches had died.¹¹ The breeding population of Great Britain fell from about 4.3 million to about 2.8 million birds, and the size of Greenfinch flocks in gardens halved.¹²

Garden Wildlife Health, the disease-monitoring partnership of ZSL, BTO, Froglife and the RSPB, calls it the largest die-off of British birds from an infectious disease on record.¹³ The BTO's species account says the decline had not yet slowed, and that it is unclear whether better garden hygiene will halt it. The latest Breeding Bird Survey report, from April 2026, says the Greenfinch appears to have stabilised in England.¹⁴ The full story: Greenfinch disease and decline.

Sick Greenfinches look fluffed up and lethargic, with wet, matted feathers around the face, and may drool or struggle to swallow. If you see one, empty your bird bath and stop feeding for at least 2 to 4 weeks so the birds disperse; if it keeps happening, stop for 3 to 6 months. The disease is no risk to people, dogs or cats.

All year: follow the RSPB's seasonal feeding advice, use hanging feeders and keep them clean. Details: feeder hygiene and disease.