Photo by W. Leon Dawson.
THE DRAPERIES OF PARADISE.
RAINIER AS SEEN BY THE SISKIN.
When fired by passion the Siskin is capable, also, of extended song. This daytime serenade is vivacious, but not loud except in occasional passages,—a sort of chattering, ecstatic warble of diverse elements. The bird has, besides its own peculiar notes, many finch-like phrases and interpolations, reminding one now of the Goldfinch, and now of the California Purple Finch. The most striking phrase produced in this connection is a triple shriek of the Evening Grosbeak, subdued of course, but very effective.
Tho perhaps not numerically equal to the Western Golden-crowned Kinglet, nor to the Western Winter Wren, there is not another bird in Washington which enjoys a more nearly uniform distribution than the Pine Siskin. Its breeding range coincides with the distribution of evergreen timber; its feeding forays include all alder trees; and roving bands are likely to turn up anywhere in eastern Washington, if there is shrubbery larger or greener than sage-brush at hand.
Much of Siskin’s food is obtained upon the ground. City lawns are favorite places of resort; these birds, together with California Purple Finches, appearing to derive more benefit from grass plots, whether as granaries or insectaria, than does any other species. They share also with Crossbills a strong interest in the products of fir trees, whether in cone or leaf. Their peculiar province, however, is the alder catkin, and the tiny white seeds obtained from this source are the staple supply of winter. Mr. Brown, of Glacier, has examined specimens in which the crops were distended by these seeds exclusively. While the observer is ogling, it may be an over-modest Townsend Sparrow, a flock of Pine Siskins will charge incontinently into the alders above his very head. With many zews and zeems they fall to work upon the stubborn catkins, poking, twisting, prying, standing on their heads if need be, to dig out the dainty dole. Now and then, without any apparent reason, one detachment will suddenly desert its claim and settle upon another, precisely similar, a few feet away; while its place will be taken, as likely as not, by a new band, charging the tree like a volley of spent shot.
Nesting time with the Siskin extends from March to September, and the parental instinct appears in the light of an individual seizure, or decimating epidemic, rather than as an orderly taking up of life’s duties. Smitten couples drop out from time to time from the communal groups, and set up temporary establishments of their own; but there is never any let-up in the social whirl on the part of those who are left; and a roistering company of care-free maids and bachelors en fete may storm the very tree in which the first lullabies are being crooned by a hapless sister. Once in a while congenial groups agree to retire together, and a single tree or a clump of neighbors may boast a half-a-dozen nests; tho which is which and what is whose one cannot always tell, for the same intimacy which suggested simultaneous marriage, allows an almost unseemly interest in the private affairs of a neighbor.
Once embarked upon the sea of matrimony, the female is a very determined sitter, and the male is not inattentive. In examining the nest of a sitting bird one may expect the mother to cover her eggs at a foot’s remove, without so much as by-your-leave.
The nest, in our experience, is invariably built in an evergreen tree, usually a Douglas spruce (Pseudotsuga mucronata), and is commonly saddled upon a horizontal or slightly ascending limb at some distance from the tree trunk. Viewed from below, it appears merely as an accumulation of material at the base of divergent twigs, where moss and waste is wont to gather. As to distance from the ground, it may vary from four to a hundred feet. The latter is the limit of investigation, but there is no particular reason to suppose they do not go higher. Most of the nests are placed at from eight to twenty feet up.
The materials used in construction are dead fir-twigs, weed-stalks, strips of cedar-bark, mosses of several sorts, grass, fir, hair, plant downs, etc. The interior may be carefully lined with fine rootlets, fur, horse-hair, feathers, altho there is great variation both in material and workmanship. Some nests appear little better than those of Chipping Sparrows; while the best cannot certainly be distinguished (without the eggs) from the elegant creations of the Audubon Warbler. One nest found near Tacoma in April, 1906, was allowed to pass for two weeks as that of a Western Golden-crowned Kinglet; it was built in characteristic Kinglet fashion, chiefly of moss, and was lashed midway of drooping twigs four inches to one side and below the main stem of the sustaining branch, near its end.
Taken in Tacoma. Photo by the Author.
NEST AND EGGS OF PINE SISKIN.