The bird in the silver aviator cap

The male chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs gengleri) sports this lovely silver aviator cap year round, but his colours get really intense in spring. Chaffinches were among the 130 bird species introduced to New Zealand following European settlement, and this seems to have been one of the less harmful introductions. They do some damage to fruits and crops, and it’s not known whether they have any significant impact on native wildlife. I searched Papers Past for references to chaffinch plagues, but came up empty. What I did find was reference to “The Chaffinch Conspiracy”, an Australian criminal case in 1911 in which the director of “The Great Chaffinch Company” had been accused of salting the lease. He had claimed to discover a potentially lucrative gold deposit near another gold mine, one which was genuine. A mining engineer hired to investigate the suspiciously rich find found nothing, which led to the charges against the Chaffinch conspirators, not to mention the stocks of all nearby mines taking a dive. There was no evidence against the men, and the charges were, ultimately, dropped.