RUBY-CROWNED WREN. i 55 
subject to considerable change of color in moulting, which may 
have occasioned all the differences we find concerning it in dif- 
ferent authors. But this is actually ascertained to be the case; 
for Mr. Edwards saw two of these birds alive in London, in cages; 
the person in whose custody they were, said they came from 
Norway; that they had moulted their feathers, and were not after- 
wards so heautiful as they were at first. One of them, he says, was 
colored very much like the Green Finch, (Z. chloris.) The Purple 
Finch, though much smaller, has the rump, head, back, and breast, 
nearly of the same color as the Pine Grosbeak, feeds in the same 
manner, on the same food, and is als) subject to like changes of 
color. 
Since writing the above, I have kept one of these Pine Grosbeaks, 
a male, for more than half a year. In the month of August those 
parts of the plumage which were red becrme of a greenish yellow, 
and continue so still. In May and June its song, though not so loud 
as some birds of its size, was extremely clear, mellow, and sweet. It 
would warble out this for a whole morning together, and acquired 
several of the notes of a Red-Bird (Z. cardinals) that hung near it. 
It is exceedingly tame and familiar, and when it wants food or water, 
utters a continual melancholy and anxious note. It was caught in 
winter near the North River, thirty or forty miles above New York. 
RUBY-CROWNED WREN.— SYLVIA CALENDULA. — Fie. 17, 
Le Roitelet rubis, De Buff. v. 373. — Edw. 254, — Lath. Syn. ii. 511.— Arct. Zool. 
520. — Regulus cristatus alter vertice rubini coloris, Bartram, p. 292.— Peale’s 
Museum, No. 7244. 
REGULUS CALENDULUS. —Sternens.* 
Regulus calendulus, Steph. Cont. Sh. Zool. vol. x. p. 760. — Bonap. Synop. 91. 
Tuis little bird visits us early in the spring, from the south, and is 
generally first found among the maple blossoms, about the beginning 
of April. These failing, it has recourse to those of the peach, apple,. 
and other fruit-trees, partly for the tops of the sweet and slender 
‘stamina of the flowers, and partly for the winged insects that hover 
among them. In the middle of summer, I have rarely met with these 
birds in Pennsylvania; and as they penetrate as far north as the 
country round Hudson’s Bay, and also breed there, it accounts for 
their late arrival here, in fall. They then associate with the different 
species of Titmouse, and the Golden-crested Wren; and are particu- 
larly numerous in the month of October, and beginning of November, 
in orchards, among the decaying leaves of the apple-trees, that at 
* See note to Regulus cristatus. 
