THE PINE SISKIN. | ee 
Siskin. Its breeding range coincides with the distribution of evergreen 
timber; its feeding forays include all alder trees; and roving bands are 
likely to turn up anywhere in eastern Washington, if there is shrubbery 
larger or greener than sage-brush at hand. 
Much of Siskin’s food is obtained upon the ground. City lawns are 
favorite places of resort; these birds, together with California Purple Finches, 
appearing to derive more benefit from grass plots, whether as granaries or 
insectaria, than does any other species. They share also with Crossbills a 
strong interest in the products of fir trees, whether in cone or leaf. ‘Their 
peculiar province, however, is the alder catkin, and the tiny white seeds 
obtained from this source are the staple supply of winter. Mr. Brown, of 
Glacier, has examined specimens in which the crops were distended by 
these seeds exclusively. While the observer is ogling, it may be an over- 
modest Townsend Sparrow, a flock of Pine Siskins will charge incontinently 
into the alders above his very head. With many sews and seems they fall 
to work upon the stubborn catkins, poking, twisting, prying, standing on 
their heads if need be, to dig out the dainty dole. Now and then, without 
any apparent reason, one detachment will suddenly desert its claim and 
settle upon another, precisely similar, a few feet away; while its place will 
be taken, as likely as_not, by a new band, charging the tree like a volley of 
spent shot. 
Nesting time with the Siskin extends from March to September, and 
the parental instinct appears in the light of an individual seizure, or decimating 
epidemic, rather than as an orderly taking up of life’s duties. Smitten couples 
drop out from time to time from the communal groups, and set up temporary 
establishments of their own; but there is never any let-up in the social whirl 
on the part of those who are left; and a roistering company of care-free 
maids and bachelors en fete may storm the very tree in which the first lullabies 
are being crooned by a hapless sister. Once in a while congenial groups 
agree to retire together, and a single tree or a clump of neighbors may boast 
a half-a-dozen nests; tho which is which and what is whose one cannot 
always tell, for the same intimacy which suggested simultaneous marriage, 
allows an almost unseemly interest in the private affairs of a neighbor. 
Once embarked upon the sea of matrimony, the female is a very deter- 
mined sitter, and the male is not inattentive. In examining the nest of 
a sitting bird one may expect the mother to cover her eggs at a foot’s remove, 
without so much as by-your-leave. 
The nest, in our experience, is invariably built in an evergreen tree, 
usually a Douglas spruce (Pseudotsuga mucronata), and is commonly saddled 
upon a horizontal or slightly ascending limb at some distance from the tree 
trunk. Viewed from below, it appears merely as an accumulation of material 
at the base of divergent twigs, where moss and waste is wont to gather. 
