Conspicuously Yellow and Orange 
each undulation with a cluster of notes, sweet and clear, that 
come floating downward from the blue ether, where the birds 
seem to bound along exultant in their motion and song alike. 
In the spring the plumage of the goldfinch, which has been 
drab and brown through the winter months, is moulted or shed— 
a change that transforms the bird from a sombre Puritan into the 
gayest of cavaliers, and seems to wonderfully exalt his spirits. 
He bursts into a wild, sweet, incoherent melody that might be 
the outpouring from two or three throats at once instead of one, 
expressing his rapture somewhat after the manner of the canary, 
although his song lacks the variety and the finish of his caged 
namesake. What tone of sadness in his music the man found 
who applied the adjective fristis to his scientific name it is diffi- 
cult to imagine when listening to the notes that come bubbling 
up from the bird’s happy heart. 
With plumage so lovely and song so delicious and dreamy, 
it is small wonder that numbers of our goldfinches are caught and 
caged, however inferior their song may be to the European species 
recently introduced into this country. Heard in Central Park, 
New York, where they were set at liberty, the European gold- 
finches seemed to sing with more abandon, perhaps, but with no 
more sweetness than their American cousins. The song remains 
at its best all through the summer months, for the bird is a long 
wooer. It is nearly July before he mates, and not until the tardy 
cedar birds are house-building in the orchard do the happy pair 
begin to carry grass, moss, and plant-down to a crotch of some 
tall tree convenient to a field of such wild flowers as will furnish 
- food to a growing family. Doubtless the birds wait for this food 
to be in proper condition before they undertake parental duties at 
all—the most plausible excuse for their late nesting. The cares 
evolving from four to six pale-blue eggs will suffice to quiet the 
father’s song for the winter by the first of September, and fade all 
. the glory out of his shining coat. As pretty a sight as any garden 
offers is when a family of goldfinches alights on the top of a sun- 
flower to feast upon the oily seeds—a perfect harmony of brown 
and gold. 
191 
