226 Wild Birds and their Haunts 



other young birds and intercepting the nest from them, 

 groweth thereby fat and fair-liking whereby it comes into 

 special grace and favour with the dam of the rest and 

 nurse to it. She joyeth to see so gooaly a bird toward, 

 and wonders at herselfe that she hath hatched and reared 

 so trim a chick. The rest which are her owne indeed, 

 she sets no store by, as if they were changelings, but in 

 regard of that one counteth them all misbegotten, yea, 

 and suffereth them to be eaten and devoured of the 

 other even before her face ; and this she doth so long, 

 until the young cuckoo, being once fledged and readie 

 to flie abroad, is so bold as to seize on the old titling and 

 to eat her up." 



Linnaeus, the German, repeats this story of the voracious 

 appetite, and hence the strange, but — to the Germans- 

 appropriate expression, " ungrateful as a cuckoo." It 

 appears, however, physically impossible that the young 

 cuckoo, whose bill is only adapted for providing a meal 

 of soft caterpillars, could ever perpetrate this horrible 

 crime, and it is suggested that a conglomeration of 

 observations of other foreign birds' habits have given rise 

 to this particular trait in this fledgling. That the egg of 

 the cuckoo is carried in its beak to the selected nest is 

 indisputable, for the shooting of the bird in transit to a 

 nest has revealed this fact, the egg having been invariably 

 found not far from the dead bird. Speaking of its in- 

 satiable appetite, the writer, when a youth, endeavoured 

 to rear a young cuckoo, and attended to it for some time, 

 and such was its appetite that it never seemed to have 

 enough. Yet it did not make any attempt to eat unless it 

 was fed. Its wild, outrageously wild, nature never for- 

 sook it. It would screech, and exhibit unmistaken signs 

 of disgust at its captivity, and all attempts at pacification 

 ended in the same way. It was, therefore, set free. 



It is a curious phenomenon of nature, that the baby 

 cuckoo is apparently endowed with strength and vigour 

 far beyond that of the ordinary bird, and it has a marked 

 propensity to rid the nest of other occupants. It 

 endeavours to the utmost of its powers to bundle the real 

 owners — or the progeny of the real owners — headlong 



