At your approach, the busy company rises on the wing, and with peculiar, wavy
flight rise and fall through the air, marking each undulation with a cluster
of notes, sweet and clear, that come floating downward from the blue ether,
where the birds seem to bound along exultant in their motion and song alike.
In the spring the plumage of the goldfinch, which has been drab and brown
through the winter months, is moulted or shed -- a change that transforms the
bird from a sombre Puritan into the gayest of cavaliers, and seems to
wonderfully exalt his spirits. He bursts into a wild, sweet, incoherent melody
that might be the outpouring from two or three throats at once instead of one,
expressing his rapture somewhat after the manner of the canary, although his
song lacks the variety and the finish of his caged namesake. What tone of
sadness in his music the man found who applied the adjective tristis to his
scientific name it is difficult to imagine when listening to the notes that
come bubbling up from the bird's happy heart.
With plumage so lovely and song so delicious and dreamy, it is small wonder
that numbers of our goldfinches are caught and caged, however inferior their
song may be to the European species recently introduced into this country.
Heard in Central Park, New York, where they were set at liberty, the European
goldfinches seemed to sing with more abandon, perhaps, but with no more
sweetness than their American cousins.
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