The Pine Grosbeak is a gorgeous winter finch, occasionally and affectionately called the "Parrot of the North" for its habit of hanging upside down and using its large bill for eating old crabapples and similar fermented fruit off of ornamental tress. Exceedingly tame, they are easy to observe in the wild from close quarters on years in which they irrupt south from their boreal breeding grounds. They are normally only present in the winter months in Vermont.
There are several subspecies in its holarctic range, but arguably only one present in Vermont: the Taiga subspecies, or Pinicola enucleator leucura.
Young and Adkisson in Birds of the World (2020) say:
Substantial variation in body size, bill size and shape, wing, tail, and tarsus length in the Nearctic populations. ... There appears to be two clades in the Nearctic, a northern clade (Pacific Northwest and Taiga population) and a western montane clade (Rocky Mountain, California, and Queen Charlotte Islands)
Of the Taiga subspecies (Pinicola enucleator leucura), they note:
Male variable, blacker (less brown) wing and tail, distinct dusky centers on mantle and back, and breast and flanks pink to pinkish-red with grayish mottling reduced or lacking; generally smaller and darker in Canadian Maritimes, larger and lighter-colored in northern Quebec and west of Hudson Bay, largest and with shorter bill in western Alaska. Female especially variable; west of Hudson Bay has olive-yellow restricted to head, short whitish supercilium arching over eye, larger pale subocular crescent and plain gray chin to breast, (first-winter birds similar to adult female, but head rich orange to rufous-orange).
Pyle (1997) writes of P.e. leucurus:
(breeds c.AK-ne.BC to Nfl-CT, wint to OR-VA): Variably large; bill variably sized (esp. culmen ...); back feathers with indistinct (female and HY/SY male) to distinct (male), dusky centers; AHY/ASY male with the breast and flanks medium pinkish red to red with little or no grayish mottling. ... Birds breeding in AK-w.NWT ("alascensis") average larger but with smaller bills, and birds breeding in s.Que-Nfl to CT ("eschatosus") average smaller, but in both cases differences are broadly clinal.
eschatosus, the Newfoundland Pine Grosbeak, and alascensis were later merged under leucura.
The descriptions above do not make it clear what subspecies are commonly extant in Vermont. I couldn't find information on where exactly our winter birds are coming from; are they Newfoundland birds? Or would they come from southern or northern Quebec, or perhaps even from west of the Hudson Bay (where, after all, our Type 10 Red Crossbills come from). Without evidence, it's hard to rule out any locale - and, without birds side-by-side, matching any individual to a type specimen is functionally impossible in the field. For instance, saying that a Pine Grosbeak was “small” is impossible, due to individual variation and lack of easy comparison.
However, the breeding range of the leucura subspecies stretches from Newfoundland past Ontario, meaning that birds which are in Vermont in the winter almost certainly could be identified as leucura. There are four other subspecies in Eurasia, one in California, one in Colorado, one in Haida Gwaii, and one elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest. None of these have known overlapping ranges in the Northeast. But as range alone should not rule out other subspecies (according to some rubrics), being able to identify this bird based on general morphology again may be difficult. Males which have dusky centers to their back feathers and with limited grayish mottling could be possibly labelled leucura, but justifying this would be shaky at best.
However, a positive identification would be possible by looking at the location, contact or flight calls (depending on who is naming the function of the call, as experts disagree). Adkisson (1981) identified that the eastern birds have distinct whistled calls, which most identify as sounding something like a Greater Yellowlegs (Pieplow (2017) says Lesser Yellowlegs).
Sibley's Sibley Birds West (2016) (although not Sibley Birds East) notes:
Flight call also varies from a soft whistled po peew peew in Taiga birds to a harder, more complex quid quid quid or quidip quidip in Pacific and Interior West.
Pieplow (2017) notes:
Typical version in East: 2-3 downslurred whistles... Sometimes recalls Pews of Lesser Yellowlegs ... One of more notes sometimes complex or unmusical ... Some versions 1-noted ... Given all year, by both sexes; most common call. Given frequently by perched birds. Extremely geographically variable and quite plastic; as in repdolls and Red Crossbills, flockmates appear to share a call type, and flocks with dissimilar call types reportedly do not mix. More study needed.
That last point should be emphasized. Looking at recordings in Vermont (of which there are, to date, 44 for the Pine Grosbeak; there are 33 globally for the Taiga (leucura) subspecies, as well), there is some variation in calls, which don't readily map onto Adkisson's Types 1, 2, and 3. A study of possible variants would be useful, especially as Adkisson's paper is now forty years old. However, even with this, a general rule is that any contact call which is 2 or 3-parted, whistled, and around 4kHz consistently could be safely used to identify a Taiga subspecies, at least until further evidence is gathered. All of the other subspecies tend to use complex calls which have more modulations.
The Pine Grosbeak gives several other calls which could be called contact, flight, or location calls which would not be diagnostic - for instance, calls given while feeding, which are small pips, trills, or whisper calls (these names differ among published references.) They also sing on their wintering grounds (including first year males and possibly females). However, only the location call identified by Adkisson should be used, which is generally a three-parted call.
When in doubt, get a recording, and check it against other Taiga calls gathered locally.
Using the call itself as an identifying factor is somewhat unsatisfactory, especially as many of my earliest identifications on eBird (and subsequently, others' as well) depended upon a misreading of Birds of the World, using the general female type specimen for west of the Hudson Bay, which isn't adequate. At the same time, all of these birds were presumably Taiga, anyway, and eBird's subspecies rules would allow for adding Taiga with the same filters as the species-level-only identification option for Pine Grosbeak.
To date, there are no records of other subspecies in Vermont. The record listed here, when I first started researching this species, was the first record on eBird of the Pine Grosbeak (Taiga) in Vermont.
Nomenclature:
Salient identification points:
Example Records:
Local subspecies records:
Needs:
These needs reflect eBird's database, and whether the bird has photos, audio, or sightings in a given area. "None" denotes that this species has been satisfactorily documented.