YELLOW-BIRD, OR AMERICAN GOLDFINCH. 509 



ing accent. These, and some other twittering notes, are 

 frequently uttered at every impulse, while pursuing their 

 desultory waving flight, rising and falling as they shut or 

 expand their laboring wings. They are partial to gar- 

 dens and domestic premises, in the latter end of sum- 

 mer and autumn, collecting oily seeds of various kinds 

 and shelling them with great address and familiarity, if 

 undisturbed often hanging and moving about head down- 

 wards, to suit their convenience, while thus busily and 

 craftily employed. They have, like the true Goldfinch, a 

 particular fondness for thistle seeds, and those of other 

 compound flowers, spreading the down in clouds around 

 them, and at this time feeding very silently and intently ; 

 nor are they very easily disturbed while thus engaged in 

 the useful labor of destroying the germs of these noxious 

 weeds. They do some damage occasionally in gardens, by 

 their indiscriminate destruction of lettuce and flov/er seeds, 

 and are therefore often disliked by gardeners ; but their 

 usefulness, in other respects, far counterbalances the 

 trifling injuries they produce. They are very fond, also, 

 of washing and bathing themselves in mild weather ; and 

 as well as tender buds of trees, they sometimes collect 

 the Confervas of springs and brooks as a variety to their 

 usual fare. 



They raise sometimes two broods in the season, as 

 their nests are found from the first week in July to the 

 middle of September. The nests are often built in tall 

 young forest trees or lofty bushes, as in the sugar maple, 

 elm, spice-bush, and cornel. They are made of strips of 

 bass, hemlock bark, and root fibres, with a filling, at 

 times, of withered downy stalks of apple-tree leaves, 

 old oak catkins, and other softish rubbish ; then bedded 

 and lined within with thistle down, the pappus of the 

 button- wood (Plat emus), or sometimes cow-hair, and fine 

 43* 



