The Rose-breasted Grosbeak ( Pheucticus ludovicianus) is a familiar bird throughout much of eastern and central North America. It is known for its beautiful, bold colors and melodic song. This article delves into the comprehensive details of the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, exploring its diet, habitat, nesting habits, behavior, and conservation status.
Appearance and Identification
The Rose-breasted Grosbeak exhibits sexual dimorphism, meaning that the male and female have different plumages. The distinctive male has black-and-white plumage and a rose-pink breast, which has earned it the colorful colloquial name "cut-throat." The female, in contrast, is striped brown and closely resembles the female western Black-headed Grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus). The males have black heads and backs with white markings along their backs and wings. Their stomachs are white, which shows off their vivid red necks and chests. Rose-breasted grosbeaks are slightly shorter than Northern cardinals, though with an incrementally larger wingspan.
Habitat and Distribution
The Rose-breasted Grosbeak is relatively common throughout much of eastern and central North America. It lives in primary and secondary deciduous and mixed forests and thickets, as well as alongside humans in parks and gardens. As a result of its use of edge and secondary habitats, it is relatively tolerant of human disturbance to habitats.
Rose-breasted Grosbeaks breed in moist deciduous forests, deciduous-coniferous forests, thickets, and semiopen habitats across the northeastern United States, ranging into southeastern and central Canada. They gravitate toward second-growth woods, suburban areas, parks, gardens, and orchards, as well as shrubby forest edges next to streams, ponds, marshes, roads, or pastures. During migration, grosbeaks stop in a wide variety of habitats including primary and secondary forest, wet and dry forest, shrub thickets, pine woods, shrubby dune ridges, scrub, urban areas, and wetlands. They spend the winter in forests and semiopen habitats in Central and South America, often in middle elevations and highlands (up to about 11,000 feet in Colombia).
This bird is an international traveler. It winters from central Mexico south to Ecuador, and some even reach Peru. A good number pass through the Caribbean during migration, and some remain to winter in the Bahamas, Cuba, and on some other islands. In its wintering range, this songbird occurs in many habitats, including in disturbed areas with fruiting trees, on shade-coffee plantations, and along the edges of dry, semi-humid, and humid tropical forests. Wintering Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are often seen in small groups, often associated with mixed-species feeding flocks. In regions including the highlands of Guatemala, flocks of up to several dozen birds can be seen. This bird is a rare vagrant to the Galápagos Islands, the United Kingdom, and other out-of-range places. In the Appalachians, the breeding range flares southward to Georgia's northern border, east of the Rockies.
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Diet and Foraging Behavior
Rose-breasted grosbeaks are omnivores with a diet that varies depending on the season. Their diet includes beetles, ants, caterpillars, bees, berries, and weed seeds including milkweed, sunflowers, and foxtail. Rose-breasted grosbeak chicks are fed mainly bugs to help boost their protein take.
During the breeding season Rose-breasted Grosbeaks eat a lot of insects, as well as wild fruit and seeds. They mostly feed on berries during fall migration, and on their wintering grounds they have a varied diet of invertebrates and plant material. Grosbeaks usually glean their food from dense foliage and branches. They also snag food while hovering, and sometimes fly out to hawk for insects in midair. The animal portion of their diet includes beetles, bees, ants, sawflies, bugs, butterflies, and moths. Their vegetarian fare includes elderberries, blackberries, raspberries, mulberries, juneberries, and seeds of smartweed, pigweed, foxtail, milkweed, plus sunflower seeds, garden peas, oats, wheat, tree flowers, tree buds, and cultivated fruit.
They forage mostly in shrubs and trees, searching for food among foliage. Sometimes it hovers to take insects from foliage or bark, or flies out to catch insects in mid-air. About half of their annual diet may be insects, including beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers, true bugs, and others, also spiders and snails. They eat many seeds, including those of trees such as elms, and sometimes eat buds and flowers. They may feed heavily on berries and small fruits in late summer and fall. Young are fed mostly insects.
Vocalizations
Both male and female Rose-breasted Grosbeaks sing, and both share incubation, brooding, and feeding duties at the nest. The song is similar to that of the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) but is sweeter and more varied, and often interspersed with the grosbeak's distinctive "chink" call note. Their characteristic call is a loud, bold "squeak" very similar to the sound of a basketball player’s foot pivoting on a gym floor. Their songs are long, rich musical phrases. Young males sing their first songs when they are about a month old. The songs seem to be learned, rather than innate.
Like the Black-capped Chickadee, Steller's Jay, and many other birds, the Rose-breasted Grosbeak's presence can be easily detected before the bird comes into view, thanks to its distinctive call. In the case of this grosbeak, both genders emit a piercing “eek!” call which keeps the bird in contact with others of its kind. Although just one note, this call is distinctive, sounding very much like a sneaker squeaking on a polished gymnasium floor. This bird also has a sweet, robin-like song sometimes characterized as sounding like a tipsy thrush.
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Breeding and Nesting Behavior
Males defend breeding territories against other males. In the winter, they can form flocks of a dozen or more birds. After raising a brood of chicks, fledglings rely on their parents for food and protection for three weeks. They often return to the same summer breeding area each year. Males will sing to advertise their breeding territory, sometimes singing more than 600 songs a day! Males use both their songs and body positioning-including flight displays-to attract a mate.
Nest Placement: The male may help the female choose a nest site, which is usually in a vertical fork or crotch of a sapling. Nesting plants include maple, red-berried elder, balsam fir, eastern hemlock, and spruce, and may be in wet or dry areas. They are usually in forest openings, overgrown field edges, old pastures, shrubby roads, railroad rights-of-way, gardens, parks, or residential areas. The male and female each may test the nest site’s suitability by settling into it and turning around several times.
Both parents work together to build the nest, which is a lightly woven bowl of grasses and twigs tucked into foliage in a tree, vine or shrub. Nests are sometimes so thin that the eggs can be seen from below. They line the nest with shredded bark, pine needles and other fine materials. The mothers lay about an egg a day until she has laid a clutch of one to five (but usually four) delicate gray-blue eggs with dark speckles. Incubation is by both parents, 13-14 days. Both parents feed the nestlings. Young leave nest about 9-12 days after hatching. Male may care for fledglings while female begins a new nest. 1-2 broods per year.
Nest Description: The male and female build the nest together in 4-9 days, working from dawn to dusk. They construct a loose, open cup of coarse sticks, twigs, grasses, weed stems, decayed leaves, or straw, and line it with fine twigs, rootlets, or hair. Sometimes the nest is so flimsy that you can see the outline of the eggs through it. The birds’ habit of using forked twigs may help hold the nest together despite its thin construction. The finished nest measures about 3.5-9 inches across and 1.5-5 inches high on the outside, while the inner cup is about 3-6 inches across and 1-3.5 inches deep.
Nesting Facts:
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- Clutch Size: 1-5 eggs, typically 4
- Number of Broods: 1-2 broods per year
- Egg Length: 0.8-1.1 in (2-2.7 cm)
- Egg Width: 0.6-0.8 in (1.6-1.9 cm)
- Incubation Period: 11-14 days
- Nestling Period: 9-12 days
- Egg Description: Pale green to blue, with reddish brown or purplish speckles.
- Condition at Hatching: Helpless, with sparse white down and closed eyes.
Social Behavior
Males sing to establish territories and attract females. When a female approaches, the male rebuffs her for a day or two before accepting her as a mate. Once mated, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks appear to be monogamous. A breeding pair will tolerate migrant males in their territory if the intruder is silent. Otherwise, territorial males ward off male intruders by spreading their tails, flicking their wings, raising their crown feathers, and often chasing the intruder away. Males respond strongly to recordings of Rose-breasted Grosbeak songs and Black-headed Grosbeak songs, but they attack mounted specimens of their own species 5 times more often than they attack specimens of the other species. Females drive off other females that approach their mate.
Conservation Status
Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are common forest birds, but their populations experienced a slow decline from 1966 to 2019, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Partners in Flight estimates a global breeding population of 4.7 million and rates them 11 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score, indicating a species of relatively low conservation concern. These birds nest in saplings, so numbers could be dropping as forests mature over the eastern United States.
The Rose-breasted Grosbeak population remains robust but is in decline, according to the conservation consortium Partners in Flight. These birds face several threats: They are often trapped for sale as cage birds throughout their winter range. Also, widespread deforestation, especially where they migrate and winter, likely takes a toll as well.
Attracting Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks
To attract Rose-breasted Grosbeaks to your yard, consider offering the following foods:
- Oil and striped sunflower
- Sunflower chips
- Safflower
- Cracked corn
- Bark Butter®
- Bark Butter Bits
- Suet dough
- Peanut pieces
- Fruits
You can also provide a bird bath or other water source, as well as plant native trees and shrubs that provide food and shelter. Rose-breasted Grosbeaks breed in moist deciduous forests, deciduous-coniferous forests, thickets, and semiopen habitats across the northeastern United States, ranging into southeastern and central Canada. They gravitate toward second-growth woods, suburban areas, parks, gardens, and orchards, as well as shrubby forest edges next to streams, ponds, marshes, roads, or pastures.
Consider using feeders such as:
- Choice Plus Blend
- Jim’s Birdacious® Bark Butter® Bits
- EcoTough Covered Ground Tray
- EcoTough Classic Bird Feeder
- Eliminator Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder
- Safflower Cylinder
- Tidy Cylinder Feeder
- APS Basic Setup - Mounting