302 U.S. NATIONAL IVIUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 i'art x 



Plumages. — As it lies in the nest with head and wings retracted, 

 the newly hatched house finch, as observed in California, appears 

 rather uniformly covered with fauiy long grayish-white filaments, 

 which stand erect and distinct. The concealed portions of the body, 

 including the neck, are nearly or quite bare. Keeler (1890b), who 

 studied these filoplumes with considerable care, described them as 

 consisting of a straight, slender, solid stem 8 or 10 mm. in length, with 

 very fine alternate branches or barbs placed at considerable intervals 

 apart. From the third day on, he foimd, the growth of the feathers 

 is continuous. At that time the wing quills first make their appear- 

 ance, and by the sixth day nearly all the feathers have sprouted, the 

 ear coverts being last. 



The filoplumes persist until all the feathers are fully grown, 

 and the filaments standing erect among the feathers of the crown 

 fiu-nish the last identification mark by which the more recently fledged 

 individuals can be distinguished. After losing these vestiges of 

 natal down, the young linnets differ in appearance from the adult 

 females principally in the streaking, which is rather narrower and 

 appears to stand out more conspicuously, perhaps because of the 

 cleaner plumage. Also, the wing coverts of the young are tipped 

 with bufi'y. 



Surprisingly, in the cooler climate of Denver the natal covering 

 seems to be much less developed than in southern California. Dr. 

 Bergtold (1913), by settmg up removable nest boxes outside his 

 windows, was able to study closely the development of the young 

 nestlings there, which he describes as follows: 



* * * the young up to the fourth day seem naked, but are really partly covered 

 by a minute down which appears in streaks, there being four lines on the head, i.e., 

 one along the skull in the long axis of the body, one over each eye, and one over the 

 occiput, transverse to the long axis of the head. There is also one along the 

 dorsum of each vsing, one over each scapula parallel with the vertebral column, an 

 inter-acetabular dorsal patch, a streak down the outside of each thigh, and a 

 sternal streak which bifurcates, one fork going under each wing, and on the second 

 day an interscapular vertebral streak appears. All these areas grow rapidly and 

 soon appear to coalesce; and by the fourth day the body seems to be covered all 

 over with down except the belly, and, by this time, the wing quills are just budding. 



Since available literature furnished little information concerning the 

 finches of the Great Basin region lying between these east and west 

 extremes of the range, an inquiry was addressed to A. M. Woodbury. 

 This resulted in studies by Howard Knight of the University of Utah, 

 who kindly supplied the following description of a brood of recently 

 hatched house finches at Salt Lake City: "These nestlings did not have 

 their eyes open, but did have several streaks of down on them. One 

 streak was slightly crescent shaped across the occiput with the points 

 of the crescent running forward. The top of the head or crown was 



