68 BRITISH BIRDS, WITH THEIR NESTS AND EGGS 



nature," as the editor of the 4th edition of Yarrell most aptly observes. 



As a cage-bird the Goldfinch is too restless to be pleasing ; he is on the front 

 wires half his time, and keeps jumping backwards and forwards from perch to 

 wires almost incessantly, vainly repeating a fragment of his song " chiivit, chiivit, 

 chiwit." In an aviary everything is altered : he darts hither and thither with 

 undulating flight, poises on the top of, or hangs underneath a twig, or the extremity 

 of a spray of fir, picking out buds or leaves ; he squabbles with his brothers in 

 the bath or the seed-pan, fights furiously for possession of a wife, and, having 

 secured her, wages incessant warfare with all who dare approach her. For a nesting- 

 site he chooses a Hartz-cage hanging high upon the back of the aviary, assists his 

 wife with her first nest, and builds a second in another cage whilst the young are 

 still under her care; such at any rate was my experience in 1895: four young 

 were hatched in my first nest, of which three flew and were brought up, being 

 fed as usual from the crop, upon partly digested seed and the soft food prepared 

 for my insectivorous birds. 



After leaving the nest the mother-bird ceased to trouble about her young, but 

 began to lay in the second nest almost immediately ; the male bird now having to 

 undertake the double duty of feeding his first family and his wife. About thirteen 

 days later five young were hatched, and but for the playfulness of the first family 

 would doubtless have been reared ; but the young ruffians pulled them all out on 

 the sand and left them there. Shortly afterwards the hen put a fresh lining into 

 her first nest and sat again upon a clutch of six eggs, all of which she hatched ; 

 unhappily all these, excepting the last one, which I put under a Canary, shared 

 the fate of their predecessors : even the sixth bird was plucked to death by its 

 foster-mother. 



In 1896 my Goldfinches again built, quarrelling for bits of wadding, robbing 

 one an others' nests, changing their minds as to the site of a nest, and pulling 

 the latter to pieces when completed ; eventually one hen laid two or three eggs 

 in a Canary's nest, and the two mothers were so constantly disputing that, although 

 the young were hatched, none were reared. After the autumn moult one of the 

 birds produced a golden instead of crimson colour on the face ; but the Rev. H. 

 A. Macpherson tells me that this is of common occurrence in captivity. 



I always purchase my Goldfinches as " Grey- pates "; and as they have plenty 

 of exercise and abundance of nourishing food, my birds when adult are invariably 

 mistaken by breeders for " Russians " ; when first turned out they always have 

 plenty of hemp and teasel, with groundsel and chickweed ; and there is usually a 

 saucer of soft-food in the aviary : the colours of the male birds are wonderfully 

 pure and brilliant, and the birds themselves are large and well-formed. 



