Rose-breasted Grosbeak

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The Rose-breasted Grosbeak is a medium-sized, stocky songbird with beautiful, bold plumage. It can be a tricky bird to find, as it often calls from treetops, but lately I’ve been spotting them.

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Its beak is large, thick and cone-shaped. It serves the bird by enabling it to eat wide varity of food items. The diet of the Rose-breasted Grosbeak varies between seasons, with a higher percentage of insects being taken warm weather. In the Winter, more seeds, fruits and buds are consumed.

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At the beginning of the breeding season the female grosbeak approaches a singing male, who in turn performs a courtship display involving flight and song. The pair is monogamous and builds a nest between May and June, with egg laying generally occurring between mid-May and July.

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Like many birds, the females aren’t as brightly colored as the males. They are not the best nest builders; Rose-breasted Grosbeaks build such flimsy nests that the eggs are often visible from below through the nest bottom.

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The Rose-breasted Grosbeak is relatively common throughout much of eastern and central North America and lives in forests and thickets, as well as alongside humans in parks and gardens.

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They are long-distance migrants. Rose-breasted Grosbeaks fly from North American breeding grounds to Central and northern South America in the Winter.

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Although often difficult to locate visually, its vocal abilities can often be heard. This bird’s sweet, robin-like song has inspired many a bird watcher to pay tribute to it. A couple of early twentieth-century naturalists said its call is “so entrancingly beautiful that words cannot describe it.”

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