LESSER REDPOLL 271 



with a bright-crimson crown and clear-white breasts. I 

 suspect that these were young males. They keep up an 

 incessant twittering, varied from time to time witli 

 some mewing notes, and occasionally, for some unknown 

 reason, they will all suddenly dash away with that uni- 

 versal loud note (twitter) like a bag of nuts. They are 

 busily clustered in the tops of the birches, picking the 

 seeds out of the catkins, and sustain themselves in all 

 kinds of attitudes, sometimes head downwards, while 

 about this. Common as they are now, and were winter 

 before last, I saw none last winter. 



Jan. 19, 1855. It may be that the linarias come into 

 the gardens now not only because all nature is a wilder- 

 ness to-day, but because the woods where the wind has 

 not free play are so snowed up, the twigs are so deeply 

 covered, that they cannot readily come at their food. 



Jan. 20, 1855. I see the tracks of countless little 

 birds, probably redpolls, where these have run over 

 broad pastures and visited every weed, — Johns wort and 

 coarse grasses, — whose oat-like seed-scales or hulls 

 they have scattered about. It is surprising they did not 

 sink deeper in the light snow. Often the impression is 

 so faint that they seem to have been supported by their 

 wings. 



Jan. 24, 1860. See a large flock of lesser redpolls, 

 eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder) in 

 Dennis Swamp by railroad. They are distinct enough 

 from the goldfinch, their note more shelly and gen- 

 eral as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black 

 wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head 

 and breast. They alight on the birches, then swarm on 



