A Canadian $1000 bill, that is. Circa 1988 or so. On the front is - who else - the venerable and right honorable Queen Elizabeth II. But resplendent In a boreal scene on the back is a pair of Pine Grosbeaks or Gros-bec des Pins for the Quebecois among you…
Recently, having spent my last Canadian $1000 bill, I turned to other resources to identify a pair of zaftig ladies munching away contentedly on crab apple berries while I sipped my morning coffee. They were munching so contentedly that every one of the dozen or so images I captured included a mouthful of berry rinds so large that the grosbeak’s grosbeak could not be seen. But the plump rounded silhouette and the lovely muted gold crown were unmistakable - two female pine grosbeaks who had ventured a bit south of their usual range in the Canadian boreal forests.
So what’s a grosbeak anyway? The word is a linguistic fusion of French for large and beak for, well, beak. Big beak. But I learned that grosbeaks are not really close family members of one another. Some are members of the finch family (evening grosbeaks) and some are members of the cardinal family (rose-breasted grosbeaks) and some are tanagers. The pine grosbeaks are bullfinches and the only species within their genus (Pinicola enucleator). To quote that ultimate authority, Wikipedia, grosbeaks are “not part of a natural group but rather a polyphyletic (really, do we need a word for everything?) assemblage of distantly related songbirds.” Another example of the carefully and logically constructed taxonomy of the birding world.
Pine grosbeaks are frugivores like but not otherwise similar to orangutans. While they generally remain in their breeding range the year around, they will exhibit irruptive behavior at times in search of food. Not to be confused with disruptive behavior (3 to 5 year old humans), irruptive behavior means that they will pop up outside of their breeding range in search of fruits like the berries in our crab apple trees. All of the grosbeaks are prone to irruptive behavior at times, and I am hopeful that this will be true of evening grosbeaks sometime soon.
I haven’t seen these ladies since that one morning over coffee, but I will keep my eyes open. I like the understated female plumage (like the female cardinals, I think), but would still hope to spot one of their boyfriends (red, of course) before long. If this hyperlink fails, have another look at your Canadian $1000 bill.