SNOWFLAKE
In the northern United States and Canada, it is the snowflake or snow bunting, a sparrowy little bird with a great deal of white among its rusty brown feathers that is the familiar winter visitor. Instead of hopping, like most of its tribe, it walks over the frozen fields and rarely perches higher than a bush or fence rail, for it comes very near being a ground bird. Delighting in icy blasts and snow storms, flocks of these irrepressibly cheerful little foragers fatten on a seed diet picked up where other birds would starve.
AMERICAN GOLDFINCH
Called also: Black-winged Yellow-bird; Thistle Bird; Lettuce Bird; Wild Canary.
Have you a garden gay with marigolds, sunflowers, coreopsis, zinnias, cornflowers, and [{125}] gaillardias? If so, every goldfinch in your neighbourhood knows it and hastens there to feed on the seeds of these plants as fast as they form, so that you need expect to save none for next spring's planting. Don't you prefer the birds when flower seeds cost only five cents a packet? Clinging to the slender, swaying stems, the goldfinches themselves look so like yellow flowers that you do not suspect how many are feasting in the garden until they are startled into flight. Then away they go, bounding along through the air, now rising, now falling, in long aerial waves peculiar to them alone. You can always tell a goldfinch by its wavy course through the air. Often it accents the rise of each wave as it flies by a ripple of sweet, twittering notes. The yellow warbler is sometimes called a wild canary because he looks like a canary; the goldfinch has the same misleading name applied to him because he sings like one.
But goldfinches by no means depend upon our gardens for their daily fare. Wild lettuce, mullein, dandelion, ragweed and thistles are special favourites. Many weed stalks suddenly blossom forth into black and gold when a flock of finches alight for a feast in the summer fields, or, browned by winter frost, bend beneath the weight of the birds when they cling to them protruding through the snow.
Usually not until July, when the early thistles furnish plenty of fluff for nest lining, do pairs of goldfinches withdraw from flocks to begin the serious business of raising a family. A compact, cozy, cup-like structure of fine grass, vegetable fibre, and moss, is placed in the crotch of a bush or tree, or sometimes in a tall, branching thistle plant. Except the cedar wax wings, the goldfinches are the latest nesters of all our birds. As their love-making is prolonged through the entire summer, so is the deliciously sweet, tender, canary-like song of the male. Dear, dear, dearie, you may hear him sing to his dearest all day long.
In summer, throughout his long courtship, he wears a bright, lemon-yellow wedding suit with black cap, wings, and tail, while his sweetheart is dressed in a duller green or olive yellow. After the August moult, he emerges a dingy olive-brown, sparrowy bird, in perfect colour harmony with the wintry fields.
PURPLE FINCH
Called also: Linnet
It would seem as if the people who named most of our birds and wild flowers must have been colour-blind. Old rose is more nearly the colour of this finch who looks like a brown [{127}] sparrow that had been dipped into a bath of raspberry juice and left out in the sun to fade. But only the mature males wear this colour, which is deepest on their head, rump, and breast. Their sons are decidedly sparrowy until the second year and their wives look so much like the song sparrows that you must notice their heavy, rounded bills and forked tails to make sure they are not their cousins. A purple finch that had been caged two years gradually turned yellow, which none of his kin in the wild state has ever been known to do. Why? No ornithologist is wise enough to tell us, for the colour of birds is still imperfectly understood.
Like the goldfinches, these finches wander about in flocks. You see them in the hemlock and spruce trees feeding on the buds at the tips of the branches, in the orchard pecking at the blossoms on the fruit trees, in the wheat fields with the goldfinches destroying the larvae of the midge, or by the roadsides cracking the seeds of weeds that are too hard to open for birds less stout of bill. When it is time to nest, these finches prefer evergreen trees to all others, although orchards sometimes attract them.
A sudden outbreak of spirited, warbled song in March opens the purple finch's musical season, which is almost as long as the song sparrow's. Subdued nearly to a humming in October, it is still a delightful reminder of the [{128}] finest voice possessed by any bird in the great sparrow tribe. But it is when the singer is in love that the song reaches its highest ecstasy. Then he springs into the air just as the yellow-breasted chat, the oven-bird, and woodcock do when they go a-wooing, and sings excitedly while mounting fifteen or twenty feet above his mate until he drops exhausted at her side.
INDIGO BUNTING
Called also: Indigo-bird.
Every child knows the bluebird, possibly the kingfisher and the blue jay, too, but there is only one other bird with blue feathers, the little indigo bunting, who is no larger than your pet canary, that you are ever likely to meet unless you live in the Southwest where the blue grosbeak might be your neighbour. If, by chance, you should see a little lady indigo-bird you would probably say contemptuously: "Another tiresome sparrow," and go on your way, not noticing the faint glint of blue in her wings and tail. Otherwise her puzzling plumage is decidedly sparrowy, although unstreaked. So is that of her immature sons. But her husband will be instantly recognised because he is the only very small bird who wears a suit of deep, rich blue with verdigris-green reflections [{129}] about the head—bluer than the summer sky which pales where his little figure is outlined against it.
Mounting by erratic, short flights from the weedy places and bushy tangles he hunts among to the branches of a convenient tree, singing as he goes higher and higher, he remains for a time on a conspicuous perch and rapidly and repeatedly sings. When almost every other bird is moulting and moping, he warbles with the same fervour and timbre. Possibly because he has the concert stage almost to himself in August, he gets the credit of being a better performer than he really is. Only the pewee and the red-eyed vireo, whom neither midday nor midsummer heat can silence, share the stage with him then.
TOWHEE
Called also: Chewink; Ground Robin; Joree
From their hunting-ground in the blackberry tangle and bushes that border a neighbouring wood, a family of chewinks sally forth boldly to my piazza floor to pick up seed from the canary's cage, hemp, cracked corn, sunflower seed, split pease, and wheat scattered about for their especial benefit. One fellow grew bold enough to peck open a paper bag. It is a daily happening to see at least one of the family close [{130}] to the door; or even on the window-sill. The song, the English, the chipping, the field, and the white-throated sparrows—any one or all of these cousins—usually hop about with the chewinks most amicably and with no greater ease of manner; but the larger chewink hops more energetically and precisely than any of them, like a mechanical toy.
Heretofore I had thought of this large, vigorous bunting as a rather shy or at least self-sufficient bird with no desire to be neighbourly. His readiness to be friends when sure of the genuineness of the invitation, was a delightful surprise. From late April until late October my softly-whistled towhee has rarely failed to bring a response from some pensioner, either in the woodland thicket or among the rhododendrons next to the piazza where the seeds have been scattered by the wind. Chewink, or towhee comes the brisk call from wherever the busy bunting is foraging. The chickadee, whippoorwill, phoebe and pewee also tell you their names, but this bird announces himself by two names, so you need make no mistake.
Because he was hatched in a ground nest and loves to scratch about on the ground for insects, making the dead leaves and earth rubbish fly like any barnyard fowl, the towhee it often called the ground robin. He is a little smaller than robin-redbreast. Looked down upon from [{131}] above he appears to be almost a black bird, for his upper parts, throat and breast are very dark where his mate is brownish; but underneath both are grayish white with patches of rusty red on their sides, the colour resembling a robin's breast when its red has somewhat faded toward the end of summer. The white feathers on the towhee's short, rounded wings and on the sides of his tail are conspicuous signals, as he flies jerkily to the nearest cover. You could not expect a bird with such small wings to be a graceful flyer.
Rarely does he leave the ground except to sing his love-song. Then, mounting no higher than a bush or low branch, he entrances his sweetheart, if not the human critic, with a song to which Ernest Thompson Seton supplies the well-fitted words: Chuck-burr, pill-a will-a-will-a.