68' THE BIRDS OF TERRICK HOUSE. 



The Greenfinch is of a gentle and Cionfiding disposition ; no bird sooner 

 becomes tame, when treated with kindness, than it. When a boy, I used 

 often to take it in a common brick-trap, in severe weather, and keep it so 

 long as the frost continued ; giving it its liberty when the weather broke up. 

 About the second or third day after being taken, it would invariably feed 

 from my hand, and sit quietly on my finger while I walked about the room ; 

 it also exhibited the greatest reluctance to leave on being set at large. It 

 possesses considerable strength of beak, feeding, when little else can be pro- 

 cured, upon hard pulse, which it is enabled to pick to pieces. I have sel- 

 dom met with eggs of this species before the latter end of April, or the 

 beginning of j\Iay. It occasionally continues to produce eggs till August, 

 between the I2th and the 24th of which said month, in the present year, I 

 found seven nests, four with eggs and three mth young, in the neighbour- 

 hood of Cokethorpe Park, within less than fifty paces of each other ; the 

 mania for late nesting would therefore seem to have been infectious among 

 these birds. One of the nests contained only three eggs on the day it was 

 found, the 21st, the fourth and final one being produced on the following 

 day ; so that this bird would not hatch its young until the first week in Sep- 

 tember, the latest period for such an event in the history of the Greenfinch 

 to occur, which has, as yet, come under my observation. 



I have, upon one occasion, found an egg of the Cuckoo in a nest of this 

 species. A question of considerable interest naturally arises from this cir- 

 cumstance. Supposing the Greenfinch, which has but little taste for insect 

 food, to have hatched the young Cuckoo, a bird whose diet consists almost 

 exclusively of insects and their larvae, neither gi'ain nor seeds forming any 

 poi-tion thereof, could it have been reared by its foster-parent ? Would she, 

 by some mysterious agency, have been led to adopt a different course of 

 treatment in the case of the young Cuckoo, to that which she would have 

 adopted in the case of her own proper offspring ? Would a vegetable diet 

 with Avhich she would principally have supplied her own young brood have 

 been entirely discarded, and insect food alone administered as a substitute ? 

 or, did the parent Cuckoo make " a slight mistake " in the matter ? Was 

 she misled by the resemblance this nest bore to that of the Hedge-Warbler, 

 and so acted under the erroneous impression that it was in a nest of the 

 latter species that she was about to deposit, or had deposited her egg ? And 

 would the young Cuckoo, in consequence of this mistake, perish in its in- 

 fancy, its foster-parent being in the dark as to the exact kind of food proper 

 for it. 



Has any reader of The Naturalist met with an instance of this bird, or 

 any granivorous one, having hatched a young Cuckoo ? If so, would he 

 obligingly communicate the result to the Editor of this Magazine, who, I am 

 sui-e, would readily give it a place in its pages. 



(To he continued.) 



