Niels Jensen spotted this lovely purple finch near Lake Memphremagog. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this species seems to be declining in number, primarily because of competition from house finches that were brought to New York City in the 1950s. "One study of finch behaviour found that purple finches lost out to house finches more than 95 percent of the times the two birds encountered each other."
Land birds and waterfowl will figure into Memphremagog: An Illustrated History, scheduled for publication in late 2014.