Length: About 4 inches; smaller than the chickadee.

Male: Olive-green above, grayish-white underneath; crown with a bright red center, bordered on each side by bright yellow, and by a black stripe that edges the yellow; a light line over the eye; wings and tail brown; tail forked.

Female: Like male, but without the red in the center of the yellow-and-black crown.

Call-note: A weak tzee, tzee, highly pitched.

Song: William Brewster, in the Auk for 1888, describes the song as follows: [It] “begins with a succession of five or six fine, shrill, high-pitched somewhat faltering notes, and ends with a short, rapid, rather explosive warble. The opening notes are given in a rising key, but the song falls rapidly at the end. The whole may be expressed as follows: tzee, tzee, tzee, tzee, ti, ti, ter, ti-ti-ti-ti.”

Habitat: Woodlands, where kinglets are usually found near the ends of branches, of coniferous trees especially.

Range: Eastern North America. Breeds in the tree-regions of central Canada, south in the Rocky Mts. to northern Arizona, New Mexico, and to Michigan, New York, and mountains of Massachusetts, and in the higher Alleghanies south to North Carolina; winters from Iowa, Ontario, New Brunswick, to northern Florida and Mexico.

Though the Golden-crowned Kinglet is one of our smallest birds, it braves the rigors of winter in the United States. It may be seen from the latter part of September until April or early May, when it goes to its more northerly nesting ground.

Kinglets and chickadees are industrious searchers for insects’ eggs. Their value is almost inestimable. Mr. Forbush tells of watching the “Gold-crest” hunt for its food among the pines. He says: “The birds were fluttering about among the trees. Each one would hover for a moment before a tuft of pine ‘needles,’ and then either alight upon it and feed or pass on to another. I examined the ‘needles’ after the Kinglets had left them, and could find nothing on them; but when a bird was disturbed before it had finished feeding, the spray from which it had been driven was invariably found to be infested with numerous black specks, the eggs of plant lice. Evidently the birds were cleaning each spray thoroughly, as far as they went.”[31]

Mr. Forbush tells also of observing the work of seven kinglets in a grove of white pine which “must have been infested with countless thousands of these eggs, for the band of Kinglets remained there until March 25, almost three months later, apparently feeding most of the time on these eggs. When they had cleared the branches, the little birds fluttered about the trunks, hanging poised on busy wing, like Hummingbirds before a flower, meanwhile rapidly pecking the clinging eggs from the bark. In those three months they must have suppressed hosts of little tree pests, for I have never seen birds more industrious and assiduous in their attentions to the trees. One might expect such work of Creepers or of Woodpeckers; but the Kinglets seemed to have departed from their usual habits of gleaning among limbs and foliage, to take the place of the missing Creepers, not one of which was seen in the grove last winter.”[32]