Name for several birds having yellow plumage; now esp. the North American goldfinch or thistle-bird, Chrysomitris (Spinus, Carduelis) tristis, and the North American summer warbler (distinctively called summer yellowbird), Dendrœca æstiva.
a. 1705. Ray, Syn. Avium (1713), 80. Regulus non cristatus Aldrov[andi]…. The small Yellow-Bird.
1738. Albin, Nat. Hist. Birds, III. 19. The yellow Bird, from Bengall…. This Bird was about the bigness of a Fieldfare.
1792. W. Bartram, Trav. N. & S. Carolina, 290. P[arus] luteus; the summer yellow bird.
1860. S. F. Baird, etc., Birds N. Amer., 421. Chrysomitris Tristis. Yellow Bird; Thistle Bird.
1884. E. P. Roe, in Harper’s Mag., March, 617/2. A fit associate for the song sparrow is the American goldfinch, or yellow-bird, which is as destructive of the seeds of weeds as the former is of the smaller insect pests.
1896. Newton, Dict. Birds, 1056. Yellowbird is the North-American Siskin … and perhaps more than one of the Mniotiltidæ.
1898. B. Torrey, in Atlantic Monthly, LXXXII. 495/2. Why should the summer yellow-bird, which pushes its hardy spring flight beyond the Arctic circle, restrict itself here in the Carolinas to the low valley lands…?
