TWENTY-SIX COMMON BIRDS. 
*5 
to distinguish them. Young males often pair while still in this 
plumage, so that the song is heard from other than the red birds. 
The males sing from the first warm days at the close of winter, 
but their rapture in the mating season is too great for even the 
wildest outbursts of song to express. They pursue each other in 
full song, or fly up and down before the female, pouring out a rapid 
series of extremely sweet warbling notes. Both sexes have a call 
note, tshif -tehee and a sharp sitt, sitt , uttered when flying. A 
few flocks retire to the southward, but many spend the winter in 
New England. Migrant birds reach New England in early 
April. 
AMERICAN GOLDFINCH, 25. 
[SPINUS TRISTIS. ] 
This lively and cheerful bird is well-known under the several 
names, American Canary, Yellowbird and Thistlebird. In the 
female and young, the bright yellow of the male is replaced by an 
olive brown, and they lack his black cap. The Goldfinches, like 
the Purple Finches, spend the greater part of the year in roving 
flocks, some of which remain in New England all winter; the 
male at this season resembles the female. Their food consists at 
all seasons of seeds, some of which they shell with great skill. 
Dandelions and thistles attract them to the lawns and pastures, 
sunflowers and bachelor’s buttons to the gardens. In winter they 
visit the weeds that stand above the snow, the birches and the 
pinfes, and at all seasons they evince by their sweet notes and play¬ 
ful ways a lively disposition which has won them many friends. 
They are the last of our birds to think of nesting, although they 
are here in early spring. They spend in music and frolic the 
months when the other birds are busily constructing their nests, 
and it is not till July that they select some shade or orchard tree, 
and place in a crotch, from five to twenty feet from the ground, a 
neat nest, deep and cup-shaped, built of fine material and lined 
with thistle down. In this are laid five or six bluish white eggs. 
