We can watch the little golden-winged warblers best, and often at very short range, when they are feeding their fledglings recently from the nest. The little birds sit quietly in the shrubbery near the ground, waiting for their parents. We can find them easily, for they frequently utter their characteristic "cricket note," and we can approach them closely, for they scarcely heed us. The parents, too, when they are feeding the young birds, pay little attention to us and come fearlessly to them even when we stand near. At such times they work in a seeming panic of hurry, flying about in the low growth searching for food, or visiting the smallest branches high up in the trees, where they cling to the terminal twigs, hanging like chickadees as they probe among the curled up leaves (insect nests) for food hidden there, then back to the waiting young, seemingly in continuous motion and without the slightest pause in their nervous activity. At this season when the parents are busy with the young birds, about the third week in June in eastern Massachusetts, they are so occupied in searching for food that the male rarely sings. In two particulars--their tameness, or indifference to our presence, and the almost complete cessation of singing thus early in the season--the goldenwing differs from the other common birds which breed in much the same regions, the chestnut-sided warbler, redstart, northern yellow-throat, ovenbird, and veery. Jacobs (1904) speaks of the anxiety of the parent birds if the nest is disturbed when the nestlings are nearly ready to fly. He says: "If the hand is placed near the nest at this period of their growth, they will scramble out and flutter away, all giving vent to their chipping note, which brings down upon the intruder the wrath of both old birds, who fly close to his face, snapping their beaks and chipping loudly; then down upon the ground they fall and feign the broken wing act as long as one of the young continues to chirp." _Voice._--The song of the golden-winged warbler is an inconspicuous little buzzing sound which one might pass by unnoticed, or hearing it for the first time, might ascribe it to a mechanical sound made by some insect, not suspecting it to be the song of a bird. Only after we have become thoroughly familiar with the song do we grasp its definite character, so that we can pick it out even when we hear it in the distance among a medley of other voices. In this particular it resembles the songs of Henslow's and the grasshopper sparrows, which are scarcely audible, and pass unregarded until well known.