Abstract
I HAVE been lately watching, with great delight, two goldfinches building their nest. They placed it nearly at the end of an outside branch of a young sycamore tree, so that there was nothing but sky above it, and the gravel path below. The window from, which I observed them, being never opened, and well covered with flowers in pots and a blind, seems to have caused them no alarm, although not more than two yards distant from them; and their object appears to have been to make their nest invisible from below. To this end they chose their building materials with such skill and such colour-matching power that if one had not seen the nest built it would be quite impossible to discover it; to match the tree they took its long flexible blossoms, and to match the sky the equally long and flexible stalks and flowers of the garden forget-me-not, of which a bed was close at hand in full bloom. I watched them carefully, and, as far as I could see, they used no other materials than these flowers, though I saw one of them attempting to get the dirty-white cotton tie off a budded rose-tree.. At all events the nest was mainly built of them. The blue of the forget-me-not has of course faded, but the general effect from below is that of a scarcely visible grey-green thickening of one of the bunches of sycamore leaves. They seemed to enjoy flinging their flower-wreaths about. And that leads to the question whether birds—who are in many ways like children—do not often out of mere playfulness and love of colour, pull to pieces yellow crocuses and other bright flowers. While my pen is in my hand I may mention, with reference to Dr. Muirhead's communication on the subject of noise causing a sensation of colour, that I have frequently observed whilst tuning a harp, that the sudden breaking of a string will cause a curious taste and sensation in the mouth, like that produced by a piece of silver and one of zinc placed above and beneath the tongue, when they are made to meet.
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J. Colour-Sense in Birds. Nature 16, 83 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/016083b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/016083b0
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