As I cleared our garden of dead vegetation, including many old teasels, I realised that the latter were still shedding seeds and luring goldfinches to them. Not wishing to deprive winter birds of food, or myself of opportunity, I planted the stalks in a single grove, and set up a mobile hide. Within minutes, a kind of magic unfolded. Sulphur wings twittered as old plants swayed with their featherweight burdens and the pointed pink beaks jabbed relentlessly for food.
Of all European birds, goldfinches are surely those best able to illustrate the survival of magical thinking in our world. Throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance, more than 300 artists across 486 works – including those of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo – painted Madonna and Child images with goldfinches secreted in them.
The reasons are complex, but the motif drew on ideas circulating since classical Greece, about a bird called the kharadrios that had the power to cure ailments simply by looking at its victims. Some had centred on the wader, the stone curlew. Yet ancient folklore was infinitely adaptable, and Christians later accorded spiritual meaning to the red face on a goldfinch, which was thought to have originated with Christ as the benign birds tried to draw the thorns from his bleeding crown.
The goldfinches depicted in the paintings were not merely symbolic of Christian faith, they were believed to possess real curative agency. Most of the paintings were done at times when plague was rampaging through Europe, and to possess such works wasn’t seen as a desperate gesture of hope, it was to own medicine. For our ancestors, art and red-faced birds were endowed equally with occult power.
We might think, perhaps smugly, that this is all very quaint and rather silly. But think: today, India and other countries grow thousands of tonnes of nyjer seed specifically for export to Europe, almost entirely because people want goldfinches in their gardens. They routinely pay a small fortune – the total UK wild-bird-food industry is worth £380m – for the creature with the satin-red face. Who says goldfinches have lost any of their gift to charm us from our perches?
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