462 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 237 part i 



no particular destination, but circled round and round in an irregular 

 manner and doubled back and forth, always rising and falling as is 

 their wont; only it seemed to me that the hills and valleys they 

 described in the air were steeper and deeper than usual. As they 

 ascended each invisible hillside in their path, they voiced the charac- 

 teristic flight call; and once one of them bm'st into full song while on 

 the wing. I watched these pretty maneuvers for about five minutes, 

 when gradually the birds drifted out of sight, perhaps to continue 

 their play in other regions. I call it 'play' because they did not appear 

 to be hawking insects — their flight was too rhythmic for that, yet 

 for a number of minutes it took them nowhere. They seemed merely 

 to rejoice in an exhilarating aerial sport." 



G. M. Sutton (MS.) states he has seen a number of times a bird 

 fly deliberately into a net close to a bird already netted and calling. 

 When netted birds gave plaintive cries, other goldfinches flew into 

 the net two by two. On one occasion he had 12 birds to extricate at 

 once. 



Charles H. Blake writes that when feeding from gray birch catkin 

 the goldfinch does not as a rule perch on the twig to which the catkin 

 is attached and rarely braces the catkin with a foot. 



Walter P. Nickell (1951) comments on the peculiar behavior of 

 abandoning many nests before completion, or at times after completion 

 but before egglaying. Occasionally, nests with eggs, or even with 

 young, are abandoned. He has seen goldfinches dismantling nests of 

 the Baltimore oriole and yellow warbler, and using the materials in 

 its own nest. 



Voice. — Aretas A. Saunders in his unpublished manuscript says the 

 song of the goldfinch is a sweet, sprightly, high-pitched one. Most of 

 the time a single song is rather short, but there are occasions in the 

 spring when birds sing long-continued songs, or songs of indefinite 

 length. Often birds will sing together in a chorus. There is, perhaps, 

 greater variation in the detail of song in one individual bird than one 

 finds between the songs of different individuals. The song consists of 

 short notes, groups of such notes on the same pitch, two-note phrases, 

 occasional short trills, and rather rarely slurs. The number of notes 

 per song, omitting the long-continued songs, varies from 7 to 22, 

 averaging between 12 and 13. Songs vary in length from Ij^ to 

 2% seconds, averaging about 2 seconds. Pitch varies from F#6 to E7. 

 The pitch interval varies from one to four tones, averaging two. 



Individual birds sing different songs, one after another, up to 

 at least 7. In spite of the great variation on the part of one bird, 

 there is a general likeness between songs of different individuals, 

 and Mr. Saunders doubts that a person could identify an individual 

 bird by the peculiarities of its songs. 



