GOLDFINCH 



to release it, I suggested an empty canary cage, recently devas- 

 tated by a neighbour's prowling cat; but my mother said: "It 

 is a tiny wild thing almost as delicate as the humming birds. 

 Would you want to see it starving for the food it likes, its feathers 

 draggled, its head bleeding from cage fighting? " We called them 

 wild Canaries; that one was back to freedom before my mother's 

 sentence was finished; then she scolded me for letting it go so 

 quickly, because my sister Ada had not had her turn at holding 

 it a minute. Such is life. 



With all of that experience with the birds, I never had located 

 and never had seen a nest until in my second summer of field 

 work, when an oil pumper on our farm found one for me on the 

 Martin lease adjoining. It was midsummer, as these birds 

 come late and build but once. It was placed in the crotch at the 

 branching of a small tree, being a very deep, large structure for 

 the size of the bird. The material was dainty fine grass and weed 

 stalks, bits of twig and moss, spider web and milkweed down 

 liberally used in the side walls and rim, the lining a white silken 

 bed. There were four eggs. Not knowing how recently the 

 bird had begun brooding and not having a tripod tall enough to 

 reproduce the eggs, which were a dull pale blue, having tiny dots 

 on the larger end, in their nest of thistle and milkweed down, 

 appearing like fine jewels, I set up and focussed the camera 

 perhaps twenty feet away, covered it and went into seclusion. I 

 heard the mother bird coming back. Baby Orioles are the most 

 talkative children of birdland, with the possible exception of 

 Swifts, but among the adults the chatter, chirp and song of the 

 Goldfinch are as nearly continuous as any notes I know. They 

 have such amiable dispositions, that were their songs less melodi- 

 ous, they would become a nuisance. Luckily, having the deep 

 cavernous upper mandible of all Finches, they have, because of it, 

 the mellow voice, full of music. 



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