CUCKOO. 107 
snails, grasshoppers, flies, and beetles, but in either case, whether 
it be their natural, or rather their unnatural parents, or their 
foster-parents that purvey for them, they are insatiable in 
their cravings for food, and their continual cry, like Oliver 
Twist, is for ‘more! more!’ Hqually earnest is the foster- 
parent in providing for their wants: one has been seen to 
alight on the back of the mtruder who filled her nest, the 
better to supply it with food. 
But, though the Cuckoo entrusts her offspring in the unac- 
countable and extraordinary way that she does to the fostering 
eare of an alien species, she does not altogether lose sight of 
it, but keeps in the neighbourhood, and, it may be, even takes 
it in some degree under her own protection after it has left 
the nest. This observation has just been corroborated to me 
by G. Grantham, Esq., and certain it is that in some places, 
probably the same where her egg has been deposited, you will 
hear the note of one or the other of the parents from day 
to day for a considerable time. Nay, more than this, 1t has 
been indisputably established that the Cuckoo, doubtless the 
female will, on occasion it may be, but certainly occasionally, 
feed her own young. This interesting fact was witnessed in 
the past year, 1850, by J. Mc’ Intosh, Esq., of Charminster, 
Dorsetshire, who was so obliging as to communicate it to 
me in the first instance, and has since published a notice of 
it in the pages of ‘The Naturalist’ Magazine. In the instance 
he mentions, a Cuckoo laid her egg in the nest of a Dunnock, 
in which the latter subsequently laid four eggs. The young 
birds hatched from these were dislodged scon after their birth, 
and simultaneously their parent disappeared also—a victim 
perhaps to grief, the gun of some fowler, or the talons of a 
cat. The want then of her care may have been the cause of 
the Cuckoo from thenceforth looking after her own young 
one, over whom she must in such case have been keeping 
some watch; and the like may have been the cause in some 
of the other similar instances, which have indubitably occurred. 
Mr. Me’Intosh distinctly saw the parent Cuckoo in question 
feed its young one, from day to day, with the greatest care 
and attention, with caterpillars; for which it flew over the 
wall into the adjoining garden, in which they were abundantly 
to be procured. ‘The indigestible part of the food of the 
Cuckoo is cast up, as in the case of the Hawks, in pellets. 
Mr. William Kidd, of Hammersmith, relates the following: 
—‘A few years since, the sight of a Redbreast feeding a 
