CUCKOO NOTES. 147 
in any form of mystery, even if but the guas?- 
mystery of a cuckoo’s ways! 
Indeed, the bird, its habits, its individuality 
and eccentricity of nesting and of oviposition, 
and its half-mystified expression of the eye, its 
hesitating, skulking flight, and its evident 
lapses into absent-mindedness, may well serve 
to impress one’s imagination, at least, with a 
suggestion of atransition state through which 
Cuckoo is passing to a lower or higher grade 
of character. 
One day, as I was going down the Salliquoy, 
a small tributary of the Coosawattee River, I 
saw from my pirogue a cuckoo’s nest on a low 
branch of a water-oak. The female was 
crouching on the insecure looking pile of 
sticks in utter terror, while a whole pack of 
blue-jays were screeching and fluttering in the 
foliage above it. I shall not soon forget the 
expression of that bird’s great solemn eyes. 
Evidently the poor thing felt that a dreadful 
fate was impending over it. But the fact was 
that the blue-jays were worrying a little 
screech-owl that had ventured into the day- 
light, and which was now cowering in its 
stolid way on another branch of the tree near 
the nest. 
Our Cuckoo, though not notably combative, 
will fight with great fury in defence of its 
young, and the males engage in fierce silent 
struggles for supremacy during the early part 
of the mating season. 
The nesting area of the Yellow-bill extends 
from Florida to Michigan, and from the Atlan- 
tic coast to some line west of the Mississippi 
River, and I am inclined to regard the black- 
billed species as having nearly the same limits 
