
Life-History of the Cuckoo. 123 
for such a monster, but is forced to vacate it, and sits perched on 
the edge, while the foster parents, unable to reach up to it from 
below, alight on its back in order to feed it.! It is at this period 
of its existence that the young Cuckoo is said to possess, or to 
acquire for a time, the note of its foster parents,’ whatever it may 
happen to be: but this point in its history requires corroboration, 
as, though asserted by many, it has never yet been satisfactorily 
settled. And then again when they have at length attained their 
full size, the young Cuckoos, though left to their own devices, and 
without their elders for their guides, as all other migratory birds 
have, follow towards the end of September, in the track of their 
parents which have gone long before, and migrate to a warmer 
clime: though what instinct teaches them when to go, and whither 
to bend their course, who shall say? Indeed to my mind this is 
one of the most astonishing points in their life-history which we 
have now touched upon. . 
And now I come to the most remarkable peculiarity of all: and 
indeed amongst these so many anomalies which we have seen to 
belong to this extraordinary bird, (and the more one studies its 
habits, the more numerous, and the more apparent do they become) 
there is nothing so strange or indeed so startling as the opinion 
put forth, as I said just now, in Germany by Dr. Baldamus, and 
afterwards followed up and demonstrated by proofs of apparently 
the most satisfactory character, on the part of himself and his 
friends; that the Cuckoo, while she lays her eggs singly in the 
nests of other birds, is able to assimilate them in colour to the eggs of 
those birds whose nests she selects :? and thus it is by no means an 
uncommon occurrence to see the egg of the Cuckoo taken from a 
Hedge-sparrow’s nest, partaking of a greenish blue tinge; another 
from the nest of a Robin of a reddish hue; another from a Pipit’s 
nest of a brownish colour; and so on through the twenty or thirty 
species, in whose nests the egg of the Cuckoo has been found. 
1G@ardener’s Chronicle, 1851, p. 469. Mag. Nat. Hist. vol. ix., p, 638. 
Naturalist 1851, p. 132, 1852, p. 33. 
? Thompson’s Nat. Hist. of Ireland, vol. i., p. 361. 
5 Zoologist, 3988. 
