central crowd have, of course, no pretensions to anything like distinguished beauty, but there is one bird—one, unfortunately, not only as a species but individually—that may, perhaps, stand up in rivalry even with the brambling.
This is a solitary male goldfinch who, as though knowing the sad and waning state of his clan, feeds all by himself and—as one seems to fancy—in a melancholy manner. Be this as it may, his mode of feeding is quite different to that of the other birds. Whilst all, or nearly all, of these are pecking odds and ends from amongst the straw and draff of the heap, using their beaks only and seeming to swallow something at each little peck, like chickens with grain, he makes successive little excursions to the stack itself, from which he extracts a blade of corn, a campion, or a thistle-head, and then, standing with the claws of both his feet grasping it (like a crow with a piece of carrion), picks it to pieces and devours it, or the seeds it contains, in a leisurely, almost a phlegmatic, way. This is quite different from the greenfinch, which—as just seen—in extracting the grain from an ear of corn, uses only its bill, standing the while in an ordinary upright attitude, and not pick-axeing down upon it as it lies along the ground. Perhaps the goldfinch can do this too, but as this particular one did not on any morning employ a different method to that which I have described, it must, I should think, be the usual one; nor did I ever see it pecking up anything from the ground in a careless haphazard fashion, like the other birds.
One can feed the birds with bread if one likes, and, when found and tasted, this is appreciated. But the
