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House Finch Reached a Record 667 in Alberta’s 2026 May Bird Count

A male house finch perched at a bird feeder
Conservation · Population & status

Volunteers recorded 667 House Finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) during Alberta, Canada’s 2026 May Bird Count, the highest total for the species in the long-running count. Nature Alberta published the result on 31 July, listing House Finch as one of eight species that reached an all-time high that year.

The May Bird Count began in 1976 and is carried out at a fixed time in late May to provide repeated snapshots of bird occurrence across Alberta. In 2026, 407 participants spent 1,173 hours counting and recorded 135,939 individual birds from 264 species, plus nine additional species during count week.

Nature Alberta presents 667 as an all-time count high. The published summary does not include a species-specific trend analysis, so the safest conclusion is that more House Finches were counted than in any previous year of the series; the result does not by itself measure how much Alberta’s underlying population changed.

Sources and image credit

  1. Nature Alberta. (2026, July 31). May Bird Count 2026 Results.Primary project result announcement. Reports 667 House Finches as an all-time high in the 2026 May Bird Count and gives the overall participant, effort and bird totals.
  2. Nature Alberta — May Bird CountProject information page. States that the May Bird Count began in 1976 and is conducted at a fixed time of year to provide information on bird populations and trends across Alberta.

Image: Rhododendrites — wild male House Finch at a feeder in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, USA, 23 November 2020. Source: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Representative species image; not a bird from the Alberta count. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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