The Greenfinch is a lovely colourful bird that displays flashes of green and yellow as it flies. They can often be found in village gardens all year round as they commonly enjoy the countryside. You can attract these wonderful birds with most bird seeds and insects but grow sunflowers, leaving the flower heads on the plant to turn into seeds for a late summer tasty treat for these birds.
As Greenfinches also eat insects you can grow plants that will attract more of these into your garden such as honeysuckle and lilac. Not only will these encourage insects but they will also fill your garden with wonderful fragrance
The greenfinch was described by Carl Linnaeus in his landmark 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae under the binomial name Loxia chloris. The specific epithet is from khloris, the Ancient Greekname for this bird, from khloros, "green".
The finch family, Fringillidae, is divided into two subfamilies, the Carduelinae, containing around 28 genera with 141 species and the Fringillinae containing a single genus, Fringilla, with four species. The finch family are all seed-eaters with stout conical bills. They have similar skull morphologies, nine large primaries, 12 tail feathers and no crop. In all species the female bird builds the nest, incubates the eggs and broods the young. Fringilline finches raise their young almost entirely on arthropods, while the cardueline finches raise their young on regurgitated seeds.
A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2012 found that the greenfinches are not closely related to other members of the genus Carduelis. They have therefore been placed in the resurrected genus Chloris that had originally been introduced by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1800, with the European greenfinch as the type species.
