Habits of the Cuckoo. 295 



its inability to distinguish it or them. The parent cuckoo 

 acts far within the line of these conditions, by introducing 

 her eggs before they are hatched : even if Montagu's sug- 

 gestion, that they are partially hatched before she lays them, 

 be the fact. Neither are these conditions opposed by the 

 hatched young cuckoo's speedy attainment of a size much 

 greater than that of its foster-parents' own young hatched 

 with it. " The extraordinary growth of the young cuckoo is 

 no more than what happens with others from eggs of a dis- 

 proportionate size : for instance, the egg of the raven is not 

 half the size of that of the kite ; and yet the young of the 

 former are not longer in arriving at maturity than the latter." 

 (Montagu, in Rennie's Mont. Orn. Diet., 164.) Consistently 

 with this view, the young proper to the young cuckoo's foster- 

 parents should attain maturity in equal progress with the 

 young cuckoo itself. That they would do so, did their pa- 

 rents secure to them their proper proportion of food, lodging- 

 room, and brooding and attention, is not to be doubted. 



This the parent birds cannot secure to their young. In 

 building their nest they built it to their own proportions, and 

 of dimensions adequate to the commodious lodgment of their 

 young ; but a giant has been stealthily introduced into it, and 

 has appropriated much of the space that their own young 

 need. The weaker must submit ; the giant must be allowed 

 to remain, and the parent birds' proper offspring must shift 

 as best they can, subject to the inconvenience of want of room 

 for ease and comfort, and liable, from the inability of the pa- 

 rent bird to brood over each one of its charge equally, to a 

 greater or less degree of detrimental exposure to the cold. 

 An instance of this last effect, occasioned to the foster-parents' 

 young, is related in p. 287. Not only are they thus incon- 

 venienced by the cuckoo's greater bulk, but are liable to total 

 ejection from their parental cradle, and to death in conse- 

 quence, from the young cuckoo's instinctive efforts to secure 

 its ease (we shall scarcely err in referring them to this cause); 

 and the facts related by Mr. Patrick, in p. 284. of the pre- 

 sent Number, and by Montagu, in the following quotation 

 from him, will show the manner, perseverance, and success 

 of its exercising them. Montagu had once " ocular proof of 

 the fact related by Dr. Jenner, of a young cuckoo turning 

 out of a hedge-sparrow's nest a young swallow [he] had put 

 in for the purpose of experiment." " I [Montagu] first saw 

 it [the young cuckoo], when a few days old, in the hedge- 

 sparrow's nest, in a garden close to a cottage, the owner of 

 which assured me the hedge-sparrow had four eggs when the 

 cuckoo dropped in a fifth. That on the morning the young 



