and there amid the branches, and it is difficult to
identify the singers. It is a minor strain, but multitudinous, and fills
all the air. The males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if to
celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which, with the elm-trees,
afford them their earliest food-supply. While they are singing they are
busy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down to
the ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut up
to ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal flowering
when they become spheres of fragile silver down.

Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called a
dandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bring
the sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss to
decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days as
well as on fair. It all has a decidedly festive air, like the fete-days
of humans. I know of nothing like it among other birds. It is the
manifestation of something different from the flocking instinct; it is
the social and holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a brief
season, as if in celebration of some special event or purpose. I have
observed it in my vicinity every spring for many years, usually in April
or early May, and it is the prettiest and most significant bird episode,
involving a whole species, known to me.

The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one of our most amiable birds.
So far as my knowledge goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. His
tones are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring reunions they
are joyous. In the peculiar flight-song in which he indulges in the
mating season, beating the air vertically with his round, open wings,
his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to his mate when she is
brooding, and when he circles about her in that long, billowy flight,
the crests of his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling,
"Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee," as if he were saying, "For love of thee,
for love of thee," and she calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"--his
tones at such times express contentment and reassurance.

When any of his natural enemies appear--a hawk, a cat, a jay--his tones
are plaintive and appealing. "Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and not
in anger.

When with his mate he leads their brood about the August thistles, the
young call in a similar tone. When in July the nestin