ON THE ORNITHOLOGY OF LAPLAND. 313 



that tlie first dress is carmine-red, and that after 

 this they assume the bright yellow-green dress to 

 which I have above alluded. But he mentions 

 nothing of this first ash-green plumage ; and that 

 he never remarked it, is pretty certain, when he 

 refers in his "Synonyms 55 to the grosbeak in 

 Wilson's plate (p. 73, Am. Ornithology), which 

 he (Mlsson) says is a younger male, and this 

 figure of Wilson's, in my edition, represents a 

 purple-red male. I fancy Kjoerbolling, the Danish 

 naturalist, had some idea of this change. Although 

 we see far more of these ash-green males than of 

 the red, it seems that we rarely find them breed- 

 ing; for out of five nests which I took, four 

 belonged to red males. The plumage of the 

 young grosbeak appears to vary in the nest as 

 well as in the first dress, for you occasionally see 

 the young birds with a tinge of red on the olive- 

 green body, but in general they are altogether dull 

 olive-green. 



The food of the grosbeak is not, as in the 

 crossbills, from the seed of the fir cones, but the 

 small buds or embryo of the young branches which 

 shoot out from the lateral branches of the fir. But 

 they can pick out the seeds from the cones, both 

 of the pine and fir, quite as cleverly as the cross- 

 bills. They feed as well on the fir as on the pines, 

 and every nest which we took was placed in a fir. 



