Her name is Ginger. She is a female hybrid between a Society finch and a Spice finch. (Get it? Ginger is good as a spice and as a tea!) She likes to cling to the wall, preening or napping, and she likes to hang from the ceiling. In this mediocre photo, she is defying gravity by perching on top of the plastic vines on a nest box. A lot of the new Finsters do that. It's particularly funny when the new birds sit on top of the plastic vines when some of the original Finsters are sitting on top of the nest box. When the new Finsters first arrived, this was cause for some serious crazy flapping, but now it's become more of a game: the original Finsters sit solidly on the box, the new Finsters loom over them clutching to the vines, all of them patiently wait to see who moves first.

If you look closely at this photo, you'll see that Ginger has a ruffled feather at the top of her head — right were the vertical line of the mesh is. This cowlick has been pretty noticeable for awhile now. In fact, in this photo from about a month ago you can also see something a little ruffled going on at the top of her head. At the time, I assumed the feathers on her head were being flipped up from the nest box. But now I'm thinking she may have had a crested Society in her background. Like canaries, a lot of Society finches are bred to have fancy feathers on the tops of their heads. Here are some photos to see (they'll open a new browser window): a Pearl crested Society finch from Acadian Aviaries, a white canary from the Canary Post, and a wildly crested Stafford Canary from Jan's Crested Canaries.

Crest, cowlick, slightly deformed feather, it's hard to say. I think it suits her.