YELLOW-BIRD, OR AMERICAN GOLDFINCH. 509 
ing accent. These, and some other twittering notes, are 
frequently uttered at every impulse, while pursuing their 
desultory waving flight, rising and falling as they shut or 
expand their laboring wings. They are partial to gar- 
dens and domestic premises, in the latter end of sum- 
mer and autumn, collecting oily seeds of various kinds 
and shelling them with great address and familiarity, if 
undisturbed often hanging and moving about head down- 
wards, to suit their convenience, while thus busily and 
craftily employed. They have, like the true Goldfinch, a 
particular fondness for thistle seeds, and those of other 
compound flowers, spreading the down in clouds around 
them, and at this time feeding very silently and intently ; 
nor are they very easily disturbed while thus engaged in 
the useful labor of destroying the germs of these noxious 
weeds. They do some damage occasionally in gardens, by 
their indiscriminate destruction of lettuce and flower seeds, 
and are therefore often disliked by gardeners ; but their 
usefulness, in other respects, far counterbalances the 
trifling injuries they produce. They are very fond, also, 
of washing and bathing themselves in mild weather ; and 
as well as tender buds of trees, they sometimes collect 
the Confervas of springs and brooks as a variety to their 
usual fare. 
They raise sometimes two broods in the season, as 
their nests are found from the first week in July to the 
middle of September. The nests are often built in tall 
young forest trees or lofty bushes, as in the sugar maple, 
elm, spice-bush, and cornel. They are made of strips of 
bass, hemlock bark, and root fibres, with a filling, at 
times, of withered downy stalks of apple-tree leaves, 
old oak catkins, and other softish rubbish ; then bedded 
and lined within with thistle down, the pappus of the 
button-wood (Plaianus) , or sometimes cow-hair, and fine 
43 * 
