I saw the flock of birds, hand unloaded my shotgun and leaned it up against a tree, then grabbed my camera. 

My grouse hunt had been interrupted by a favorite winter bird: The common redpoll.

The common redpoll is a small finch that, in the winter months, likes to travel Northwest Montana in big flocks, typically feeding on the catkins of the paper bark birch that proliferated in the South Fork forest the dog, the boy and I were hunting. 

Fortunately, I also had a camera with a 400 mm lens strapped to my chest to get the photo. (What’s another 7 pounds, lol?). 

Up close, the common redpoll is a small finch with a red cap, two white wing bars, a notched tail and a short yellow bill surrounded by black; at least the males are. The females are far more drab. 

Their typical winter feeding is frenetic and short-lived, as the finches are prey for a host of predatory birds and mammals. Flocks can be as large as 700 birds and their buzzy call is easy to mistake for another affable species, the pine siskin. 

In Montana, they’re definitely a winter bird. Their breeding range is circumpolar, and in North America they breed in northern Alaska and Canada, whereas you can find pine siskins in places like Glacier National Park all year long. 

Common red polls are acrobatic birds, often hanging upside down as they feed. 

In the winter, their primary forage is seeds, but in the summer, it’s often insects and spiders. 

In winter, some redpolls roost in tunnels under the snow, where the snowpack provides insulation and stays much warmer than the night air, according to Cornell’s University's “All about Birds.” 

In 2024, ornithologists lumped common redpoll, hoary redpoll and lesser redpoll (a European species) into a single species known simply as redpoll. Despite color and size differences between the three forms, they are nearly identical genetically, with a single chromosomal inversion (or "supergene") responsible for visible variation.   

Despite their size, red polls are quite smart. Animal behaviorists commonly test an animal’s intelligence by seeing if it can pull in a string to get at a hanging piece of food. Redpolls pass this test with no trouble. They’ve also been seen shaking the seeds out of birch catkins, then dropping to the ground to pick them up from the flat snow surface. 

A few banding records have shown that some redpolls are incredibly wide ranging. Among them, a bird banded in Michigan was recovered in Siberia; others in Alaska have been recovered in the eastern U.S., and a redpoll banded in Belgium was found two years later in China, according to “All About Birds.” 

Here, the encounters are often fleeting, but no less fun. My latest photo encounter lasted all of a minute and then “whoosh!” they were gone.