124 CUCULUS CANORUS. 



food, and therefore fills its stomach as full as it can, and swal- 

 lows hair, down, and feathers, hatches its eggs and digests its 

 food quite efficiently. 



It appears from the observations of various persons, that the 

 Cuckoo, having found a nest, watches for the absence of its 

 owner, then deposits its egg, and flies oif ; that in general the 

 nest in which it places its egg contains none or few eggs ; that 

 the owners of the nest sometimes eject the intruded egg ; and 

 that in a few instances two Cuckoos' eggs have been found in 

 the same nest. It is also stated that the Cuckoo, on depositing 

 its egg in a nest already containing eggs, sometimes carries off 

 one or more of them ; but frequently nests have been found 

 containing the ordinary number of eggs along with that of the 

 Cuckoo. Pipits and other small birds finding a Cuckoo at or 

 near their nest manifest alarm, anxiety, and hatred towards it, 

 just as they would toward a Jay or other suspected bird. 



It was known to the ancients that this bird leaves its egg 

 to be hatched by another, but they mingled the real with the 

 fabulous, believing that the young devoured not only those of 

 its foster-parents, but finally the latter themselves. The man- 

 ner in which the young Cuckoo's fellow-lodgers disappear from 

 the nest is perhaps as marvellous as anything else in the his- 

 tory of this strange bird. A pair of Pipits, Wagtails, or Hedge 

 Chanters, would find it a sufficient task to provide their own 

 young with food, and probably would be unable to satisfy in 

 addition the incessant cravings of the young Cuckoo, which 

 grows very rapidly, and as it soon completely fills the nest, 

 would crush to death or suffiacate its feebler fellow-lodgers. 

 The young Cuckoo, as if in order to obtain sufficient nourish- 

 ment, and prevent the protracted misery of its foster-brethren, 

 ejects them from the nest, and their parents, unable to replace 

 them, or failing to recognise them, leave them to perish. The 

 exclusive occupation of the nest by the young Cuckoo was first 

 satisfactorily accounted for by Dr Jenner, the discoverer of 

 vaccination, who, in the Philosophical Transactions for 1788, 

 states that having found a nest of the hedge-sparrow contain- 

 ing a cuckoo's egg and three of the hedge sparrow's, but the day 

 following a young cuckoo and a young hedge-sparrow, two of 



