The Pine Siskin 



poking, twisting, prying, standing on their heads if need be, to dig out 

 the dainty dole. Now and then, without any apparent reason, one 

 detachment will suddenly desert its claim and settle upon another tree, 

 precisely similar, a few feet away; while its place will be taken, as likely 

 as not, by a new band, charging the tree like a volley of spent shot. 



Nesting time with the Siskin extends from March to September, and 

 the parental instinct appears in the light of an individual seizure, or 

 decimating epidemic, rather than as an orderly taking up of life's duties. 

 Smitten couples drop out from time to time from the communal groups, 

 and set up temporary establishments of their own; but there is never 

 any let-up in the social whirl on the part of those who are left; and a 

 roistering company of care-free maids and bachelors en fete may storm 

 the very tree in which the first lullabies are being crooned by a hapless 

 sister. Once in a while congenial groups agree to retire together, and a 

 single tree or a clump of neighbors may boast half-a-dozen nests; though 

 which is which and what is whose one cannot always tell, for the same 

 intimacy which suggested simultaneous marriage, allows an almost 

 unseemly interest in the private affairs of a neighbor. 



Once embarked upon the sea of matrimony, the female is a very 

 determined sitter, and the male is not inattentive. In examining the 

 nest of a sitting bird one may expect the mother to cover her eggs at a 

 foot's remove, without so much as by-your-leave. 



The nest, in our experience, is almost invariably built in an evergreen 

 tree, usually a Douglas spruce (Pseudotsuga mucronata), a young redwood, 

 or, in the San Francisco section a Monterey Cypress. So strong is this 

 bird's predilection for the last-named tree as a nesting site, that it will 

 repair to the orderly rows which bound properties in and about San 

 Francisco. Messrs. Carriger and Pemberton report 1 that of forty nests 

 of the Pine Siskin found in San Mateo and San Francisco counties, all but 

 one were in cypress trees, while the exception came from the very top of a 

 fifty foot eucalyptus. Since these gentlemen have made a very close study 

 of this species, I put the description of sites and nests in their own words: 



"Nests were usually about twelve or fifteen feet from the ground, 

 but notes show records of several forty feet up, and one fifty feet from the 

 ground. The site chosen was almost invariably about six or eight feet 

 from the trunk of the tree and upon the top of a good, strong, leafy limb. 

 The nests were well built, quite compact, and slightly larger than those 

 of the Green-backed Goldfinch whose nesting theSiskins' closely resembles. 

 Nests were constructed of dry roots, grass and leaves from under the 

 cypress trees, and were generally, though not always, lined with consider- 

 able hair. The nests were always of the same material and could be 



1 Condor, Vol. IX., Jan., 1907, pp. 18-19. 



186 



