454 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 237 part i 



"Between July 13 and August 3 I found, in the neighborhood of 

 Ithaca, eight occupied nests, all in roadside trees except one that had 

 been built at the outside of a small, isolated clump of pine trees 

 growing in an open field. Six of the eight nests were in young white 

 pines, from eight to eighteen feet above the ground; one was twenty 

 feet up in a white oak; and the highest of all about thirty feet up in 

 a roadside maple. The firm, compact little cups were generally 

 placed well out on horizontal boughs, sometimes straddling the 

 branches; and those in the white pines were situated in the midst 

 of a whorl of branchlets that provided lateral support. One nest 

 that I examined carefully was composed of bits of bark, grass and 

 fibers of various sorts, giving the exterior a dark brown color, while 

 the inside was softly lined with white thistle-down which matched 

 the spotless eggs. Of the nests into which I could look, one contained 

 four eggs, one five, and three held six eggs. At one nest the eggs 

 were laid on consecutive days. By August 3 one goldfinch had just 

 begun to lay, while another had newly hatched nesthngs. 



"Among goldfinches incubation is performed by the female alone. 

 She sits with a constancy quite unusual in so diminutive a bird, as 

 a rule disregarding trespassing small birds of her own or other kinds, 

 men who move about below her nest and stand or sit without con- 

 cealment to watch her, and the noisy passage of motorcars if, as often 

 happens, she has built above a busy highway. For food she depends 

 largely upon her mate throughout the period of incubation. She 

 distinguishes him, evidently by voice, from other male goldfinches 

 who fly about the vicinity dropping their little silver coins of sound; 

 and when she hears her partner and is hungry, she calls out from the 

 nest to attract his attention. Then her clear, tinkling, little notes 

 are so sweetly melodious that one not well acquainted with the gold- 

 finch might suppose them to be the bird's song. Once while passing 

 along a road bordered with pine trees, I heard — so I thought — a gold- 

 finch singing, and after considerable scanning of the boughs above me 

 discovered a female sitting in a nest, so well hidden among the pine 

 needles that, had she been silent, I should have passed by without 

 suspecting its presence. Apparently she was hungry and calling 

 her mate to bring food. Thus the pretty hunger call reveals the nest's 

 position to the goldfinches' friends — and I fear that at times it must 

 also betray it to their enemies. On a small scale, it is like the raucous 

 hunger cry of the incubating female White-tipped Brown Jay, which 

 in the Caribbean lowlands of Central America has led me to nests 

 hundreds of yards away. 



"Although it has long been known that the male goldfinch feeds his 

 incubating mate, we have not much information on how often he does 

 this, or how constantly the female, with such support, is able to cover 



