Well-groomed lawns and gardens can be nearly devoid of the arthropod populations vital to sustain hummingbirds. What you do in your yard might be perfect for hummingbirds but on too small a scale. Unless several neighbors work cooperatively to attract hummingbirds, you might do all the right things and never get them to stay because of spatial constraints. Finches can be the most reliable of all feeder birds. However, they will show pulses in their presence, absence, and abundance.
Goldfinches are the last songbirds to nest each year in North America.
We expect to see them for a time in late summer or early autumn, then vanish for awhile, then reappear in winter. This is predictable routine for them in many parts of their range. Unlike goldfinches, which virtually never eat insects but subsist almost entirely on a diet of seeds, purple finches and house finches seasonally alternate between diets of seeds and insects. During their insect-feeding stage, they naturally visit feeders less frequently. Violent weather can dramatically alter the landscape.