Fulton. — The Pijyiwharauroa, or Bronze Cuckoo. 395 



for the action of the adult birds ; but what a mystery is before our eyes 

 when we think of the young, newly fledged birds leaving this country and 

 starting to wing their way back to New Guinea — unguided by their parents, 

 who have left before them — accompanied only by a number of young 

 birds as ignorant as themselves of the locality of the winter home in the 

 tropics ! Still more mysterious is this when we read of a young cuckoo, 

 kept in a state of captivity, and prevented from migrating at the proper 

 season, entranced, as it were, in an instinct of migrating, keeping up for 

 hours an apparent flight over a trackless ocean. 



Benjamin Kidd (15) says of the English cuckoo, " Some years ago I 

 had the good fortune to rear from the beginning a specimen of the young 

 of the common cuckoo. As my young cuckoo became full grown it was 

 gradually attuned by nature for its wonderful migratory flight. The cuckoo 

 travels in its annual migrations enormous distances over land and sea, 

 sometimes from the extreme north of Europe across the Equator into the 

 Southern Hemisphere. In this case there is no room for thinking that the 

 young birds find their way as the result of any teaching from the older 

 birds of the kind, for these leave many weeks later than the older birds, 

 and so travel apart. As the season waned, and the time for the migration 

 of my young cuckoo approached and passed, its behaviour grew interesting. 

 The bird always became very restless in the evening. Being much attached 

 to me, it generally settled at last, so as to be near me, on the stationery- 

 case on the table on which I was writing, in the dim light thrown by the 

 upper surface of the green shade of the reading-lamp by which I worked. 

 Here, as the hours wore on, the same thing happened every night. After 

 a short interval the muscles of the wings began to quiver, this action being 

 to all appearance involuntary. The movement gradually increased, the 

 bird otherwise remaining quite still, until it grew to a noiseless but rapid 

 fanning motion of the kind that one sees in a moth when drying its wings 

 on emerging from the chrysalis. This movement tended to grow both in 

 degree and intensity, and it generally lasted as long as I sat up during the 

 night. In the early stages of this mood the bird responded when I spoke 

 to it, but in time it ceased to do so, and became lost in a kind of trance, 

 with eyes open and wings ceaselessly moving. Brain, muscles, nervous 

 system, and will all seemed to be inhibited by the stimulus that excited it. 

 The bird became, as it were, locked in the passion of that sense by which 

 the movement of flying was thus stimulated. It was one of the strangest 

 sights I had ever witnessed^ — this young migratory creature of the air, which 

 had never been out of my house, and which had never known any of its 

 kind, sitting beside me in the gloom of our northern winter and in the dim 

 lamplight, by a kind of inherited imagination, yet which was not imagina- 

 tion in our sense, flying thus through the night league-long over lands and 

 oceans it had never seen." It would be of extreme interest if some of our 

 naturalists would capture and retain some of our young cuckoos of each 

 species and endeavour to determine whether the same thing would occur 

 here. 



Richard Kearton (16), the well-known writer on birds and their nests, 

 says, " The speed and endurance of some species is remarkable. It i? 

 asserted that both the common swift and the Virginian plover can travel 

 well over two hundred miles an hour, and the former bird is on its untiring 

 wings sixteen hours a day. The performances of our " ocean greyhounds," 

 which have an unlimited amount of coal and water, are paltry in the 

 extreme when compared with those of a bird which could easily fly from 



