The Purple Finch 
111 
his cousin, the Song Sparrow, and give us the perpetual hope that we 
may hear his voice in every month of the year — a hope that is usually 
fulfilled. Those that have wintered with us in New England begin 
to warble a little in late March, and the same partial song may be heard 
in October, after the molt; but the song that suddenly bursts into ex- 
uberance, rendering him one of our most conspicuous songsters, and re- 
calling many notes of the English Chaffinch, belongs to the nesting season. 
It is almost impossible to render the song of a bird in syllables 
so that it shall appeal to every sort of person ; for, as bird-music is phrased 
according to the natural, not the artificial key that we associate with 
annotation, its translation is a matter of mood, 
temperament, and accord between imagination and ear. 
To me, when the voice of the Crimson Finch bursts 
forth in sudden joyousness, it cries, “List to me, list to me, hear me, 
and Til tell you — you, you !” There must be, however, some similarity 
between these syllables and the song, because more than once, on en- 
deavoring to name a curiously described bird that I suspected might 
be this finch, the rapid whispering of these words has completed the clue, 
by the inquirers exclaiming — “Yes, that is the way the song went.” 
Yet, do the best we can to suggest the rhythm of the song, the music of 
it belongs to the woods and fields, the sky and sun, from which we 
may not separate it. Forbush says of it : “The song of the male is 
a sudden, joyous burst of melody, vigorous, but clear and pure, to> which 
no mere words can do justice. When, filled with ecstasy, he mounts 
in air and, hangs with fluttering wings above the tree where sits the one 
who holds his affections, his efforts far transcend his ordinary tones, 
and a continuous melody flows forth, until, exhausted with his vocal 
efforts, he sinks to the level of his spouse in the tree-top.” 
Purple Finches often travel in flocks, and are at all times somewhat 
gregarious ; this trait has made them an easy prey for bird-catchers, and 
in past years, when the practice of caging our wild birds prevailed, these 
Finches were trapped in great numbers and sold in the bird-stores, or 
sent to Europe, as “Red Linnets.” Alexander Wilson thought it no 
harm to cage them. “The Purple Finches,” he writes in his “American 
Ornithology,” “possess great boldness and spirit, and, 
when caught, bite violently and hang by the bill from 
your hand, striking with great fury ; but they are soon 
reconciled to confinement and in a day or two are quite at home. 
I kept a pair of these birds upward of nine months, to observe their 
manners. Both are now as familiar as if brought up by hand from 
the nest, and seem to prefer hemp-seed and cherry-blossoms to all 
other food. . . . When these birds are taken in their crimson dress, 
and kept in a cage until they molt their feathers, they uniformly change 
their appearance and sometimes never after regain their red color. 
. . . They are also subject, if well fed, to become so fat as literally 
to die of corpulency.” 
Unhappy 
Prisoners 
