The bullfinch does not often go to the ground to feed; he gets most of his food on trees and bushes—insects, buds, fruit, and seeds of various kinds. He inhabits woods, plantations, and thickets, and is often seen in thick hedges and in the tangled vegetation growing by the side of streams. Where he is not persecuted he is a tame and rather sedentary bird, and will allow a person to approach within a dozen yards before leaving his perch. His call and alarm note is a low, piping, musical sound, very pleasant to hear. The male sings in the spring, and so, it is said, does the female; but his strain is short, and so feeble that it can be heard only at a distance of a few yards.
The nest is built during the last half of April in a holly or yew, or other dense, dark bush or tree, or in a thick hedge. It is unlike the nest of any other finch, being outwardly a platform-shaped structure made of interwoven twigs, with a cup-shaped nest in the centre, formed of fine rootlets, the rim of the cup projecting above the platform it is built on. The eggs are four to six, greenish blue in ground-colour, spotted and sometimes streaked with dark purplish brown, and blotched with pinkish brown.
Bullfinches pair for life, and at all seasons of the year male and female are seen together; if any young are reared, they usually remain in company with the parent birds during the autumn and winter months.
Nearly allied to the common bullfinch are two beautiful birds which have a place in our list of species. One of these is the rosy bullfinch (Carpodacus erythrinus), of which two or three stragglers have been found in England; it breeds in Finland, and is found throughout the Russian Empire. The other is the pine grossbeak (Pinicola (enucleator), also a rare straggler to Britain from the north of Europe.
Crossbill.
Loxia curvirostra.
Fig. 50.—Crossbill. ¼ natural size.
Wing and tail feathers brown; all other parts green, yellow, orange, and tile-red, according to age and sex. Red is the colour of the adult male in a state of nature, and yellow in captivity. Length, six inches and a half.