They usually select a small upright tree, such as a young elm, apple, or pear, or a tall shrub, for their nest, which they rarely place higher than ten
feet from the ground. Than the nest of our Goldfinch we have no more beautiful specimen either of the basket in shape or the felted in structure. Symmetrical in form, delicately and beautifully woven, and ingeniously and firmly fastened around the forked twigs with which it is interlaced, it is an exquisite example of architectural beauty and finish. A beautiful specimen from Wisconsin may be taken as typical. It measures three inches in diameter and two in height. The cavity is one and a half inches wide at the rim, and the depth is the same. The base of this nest is a commingling of soft vegetable wool, very fine stems of dried grasses, and fine strips of bark, all being in very fine shreds. The sides, rim, and general exterior of the nest is made up, to a large extent, of fine slender vegetable fibres, interwrought with white and maroon-colored vegetable wool. These materials are closely and densely felted together. The inner nest is softly and thoroughly lined with a softer felting made of the plumose appendages or pappus of the seeds of composite plants.
The eggs, usually five, rarely six in number, are of a uniform bluish-white, sharply pointed at one and rounded at the other end. They measure from .65 to .67 of an inch in length and from .50 to .55 in breadth. Dr. Cooper gives their measurement as .60 by .50; but of the contents of seven nests before me not an egg is less than .65 in length, and but one so small as .50 in breadth.
A nest of this Finch, built in a young elm-tree in Hingham, eight feet from the ground, was begun July 27, finished and the first egg laid August 1. By the 4th five eggs had been deposited, and on the 16th they had all been hatched.
Chrysomitris psaltria, var. psaltria, Bonap.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOLDFINCH; ARKANSAS GOLDFINCH.
Fringilla psaltria, Say, Long’s Exped. R. Mts. II, 1823, 40.—Aud. Orn. Biog. V, 1839, 85, pl. cccxciv. Fringilla (Carduelis) psaltria, Bon. Am. Orn. I, 1825, 54, pl. vi, f. 3. Carduelis psaltria, Aud. Syn. 1839, 117.—Ib. Birds Am. III, 1841, 134, pl. clxxxiii. Chrysomitris psaltria, Bp. List, 1838.—Ib. Consp. 1850, 516.—Gambel, Jour. A. N. S. 2d series I, 1847, 52 (female).—Baird, Birds N. Am. 1858, 422.—Cooper, Orn. Cal. 1, 168.
Sp. Char. Male. Upper parts and sides of head and neck olive-green. Hood, but not sides of head below eyes, lores (or auriculars?), upper tail-coverts, wings, and tail black. Beneath bright yellow. A band across the tips of the greater coverts, the ends of nearly all the quills, the outer edges of the tertiaries, the extreme bases of all the primaries except the outer two, and a long rectangular patch on the inner webs of the outer three tail-feathers near the middle, white. Female with the upper parts generally, and the sides olive-green; the wings and tail brown, their white marks as in the male. Length, 4.25; wing, 2.40; tail, 1.85. Young like the female, but wing-bands more fulvous.
Hab. Southern Rocky Mountains to the coast of California; north to Salt Lake City (June 19; Ridgway), and Siskiyou Co., Cal. (Vuille); south to Sonora (Arispe, Feb. 26; E. S. Wakefield).
With quite a small series of specimens, a perfect transition can be shown from the typical C. psaltria, as above described, to the C. columbianus, the opposite extreme (see table, page 471). The former is the most northern, the latter the most southern form; arizonæ and mexicana, intermediate in habitat, are also as strikingly so in plumage. The difference is in the quantity of the black, this color predominating over the olive of the back and the white of wings and tail, in proportion as we go southward. There cannot, upon the whole, be any doubt that they are all specifically the same. The females can scarcely be distinguished.