CUCKOO. 99 
Henry Gurney, and William Richard Fisher, Esqrs., in their 
account of the Birds found in that county. 
The general appearance of the Cuckoo is ‘strikingly like that 
of the female Sparrow-Hawk. It frequents localities of the 
i the dreary fen, the wild heath of 
the open treeless moor, as well as those in which brushwood 
abounds, and the well-wooded hedge-rows of the best cultivated 
districts. 
It need hardly be mentioned that the Cuckoo is a migratory 
bird: ‘in April come he will,’ and that about the middle of 
the month—generally on the 17th.; it has been heard on the 
15th.; once on the 18th., as mentioned by Mr. Thompson, of 
Belfast, but frequently not until one or other of the days 
between these dates and the 30th. One was both heard and 
seen at Malvern, in Worcestershire, a neighbourhood which 
has been noticed as more than ordinarily abounding in these 
birds, on the 12th. of January, 1851, as recorded by F. R. 
Gibbes, Esq., of Northallerton, in ‘The Naturalist,’ page 43; 
and on the 14th. of April, also in the present year, two were 
seen by J. O. Harper, Esq., of Norwich, as recorded in “The 
Naturalist,’ page 162. One of them was heard at the same 
time, and ae other was shot, and proved to have been carrying 
its egg in its bill. The males arrive a day or two’ before 
the females; and the old birds leave the country in the autumn 
before the young ones. The general time for the former to 
depart is in the end of July or beginning of August; but it 
would appear as if, though they commence ‘their outward-bound 
movement from north “to south, about this time, that they 
do not finally quit the land until rather later. 
An adult Cuckoo was shot near Thirsk, Yorkshire, by Mr. 
Johnstone, son of the Rev. Charles Johnstone, Canon of York, 
on the 14th. of August, in the present year, 1851; and another 
old one near Leeds, on the 24th. of July, also in this year, 
by Mr. Bond, of that place. Another has been seen on the 
3lst. of July. The young birds do not leave before September; 
and have been known in Cornwall until October, and likewise 
in Oxfordshire, by the Revs. Andrew and Henry Matthews, 
who also record in their ‘Catalogue of the Birds of Oxford- 
shire and its Neighbourhood,’ that ‘on the 23rd. and 24th. 
of September, 1848, a Cuckoo was heard singing in the early 
part of the morning:’ another was heard near Belfast, on the 
7th. of July, 1888; and another by Mr. W. H. White, on the 
28th. of July, as recorded in the ‘Magazine of Natural History,’ 
