2o6 Birds Every Child Should Know 



breasts. You may know the yellow-billed 

 cuckoo by the yellow lower-half of his long, 

 curved bill, his cinnamon-brown wings and the 

 conspicuous white thumb-nail spots on his 

 dark tail feathers. If you were to dip your 

 thumb in white paint, then pinch these outer 

 quills, you would leave similar marks. 



Most birds will not touch the hairy, fuzzy 

 caterpillars — very disagreeable mouthfuls, one 

 wotild think. But happily cuckoos enjoy them 

 as well as the smooth, slippery kind. " I guess 

 they Hke the custard inside," said a little boy 

 I know who had stepped on a fat caterpillar on 

 the path. "Cuckoos might well be called 

 caterpillar birds," wrote Florence Merriam 

 Bailey, " for they are so given to a diet of the 

 hairy caterpillars that the walls of their stom- 

 achs are actually permeated with the hairs, and 

 a section of stomach looks like the smoothly 

 brushed top of a gentleman's beaver hat." 

 When you see the webs that the tent cater- 

 pillar stretches across the ends of the branches 

 of fruit and nut trees toward the end of summer, 

 or early autumn, watch for the cuckoo's visits. 

 Orioles, also, tear open the webs to get at the 

 wiggling morsels inside, but they leave dead 

 and mutilated remains behind them, showing 

 that their appetite for web worms is less keen 

 than that of the cuckoos, who eat them up clean. 

 Fortunately the caterpillar of the terribly 



