Purple finch
species of bird
The purple finch (Haemorhous purpureus) is a bird in the finch family, Fringillidae. It breeds in the northern United States, southern Canada, and the west coast of North America.
Taxonomy
The purple finch was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the finches in the genus Fringilla and coined the binomial name Fringilla purpurea. Gmelin specified the locality as Carolina. Gmelin based his account on the "purple finch" that had been described and illustrated by the English naturalist Mark Catesby in his book The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. The purple finch is now one of three finches placed in the genus Haemorhous that was introduced in 1837 by the English naturalist William Swainson.
Two subspecies are recognised:
H. p. purpureus (Gmelin, JF, 1789) – central south, southeast Canada and northeast USA
H. p. californicus (Baird, SF, 1858) – southwest Canada and west USA
This species and the other "American rosefinches" were formerly included with the rosefinches of Eurasia in the genus Carpodacus; however, the three North American species are not closely related to the rosefinches of the Old World, and have thus been moved to the genus Haemorhous.
“Purple finch” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Purple, finch and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q27075782. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1789, 1837 and 1858.
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This entry incorporates text from “Purple finch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.