' ° I 'i90^ 111 ] Townsend, Birds of Cape Breton Island. 
177 
The song was frequently ringing in my ears, and it is a song that 
is well worth recording, especially as most writers give such an 
imperfect idea of it. Wilson, Nuttall, Minot, Steams and Coues, 
Langille, and Hoffmann do not mention it. Audubon says: “Its 
song is at times mellow and agreeable. ” Baird, Brewer, and 
Ridgway say of captive birds that “their songs were irregular 
and varied, but sweet and musical.” Brewster 1 in his ‘Notes on 
the Birds observed during a Summer Cruise in the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence’ says: “The old males occasionally uttered a feeble, 
trilling song very like that of the Snowbird.” Chapman says: 
“Their song is low, soft, and sweet, much like that of the Ameri- 
can Goldfinch.” G. M. Allen in his ‘Birds of New Hampshire’ 
says: “The song which I have sometimes heard in July is a series 
of trills alternately high and low.” 
The last is the best description of the song as I heard it at Cape 
Breton. The trills resembled so closely those of the Canary-bird, 
that several persons who heard it spoke of the bird as the “Wild 
Canary.” Far from being low and feeble, the song was delivered 
with great vigor and abandon, the birds often flying about in large 
circles over the woods. Occasionally the song was delivered from 
the top of an evergreen, but usually its vehemence was so great 
that the bird was lifted up into the air, where it flew about slowly, 
pouring out meanwhile a great volume of music. This lasted for 
minutes at a time, and ceased, only when the exhausted bird came 
to a perch. The song would often be at once taken up by another 
bird, and occasionally several were singing in the air at a time. 
'File volume of the sound was constantly swelling and dwindling, 
at times a low sweet warbling, then a rough rattling, more like a 
mowing-machine, then a loud all-pervading sweet, sweet, sweet, 
recalling exactly a Canary-bird. Anon the song would die down 
to a low warbling, and again burst out into a loud sweet trilling 
whee, whee, whee. 
When singing from a perch, which was always the tip-top of a 
spruce or fir, the Crossbill frequently twitched its tail, and erected 
the feathers of its crown. One fairly good singer appeared to be 
rather immature, being mostly gray with but a faint tinge of red 
1 Loc. cit. 
