Brown, Olive or Grayish Brown, and Brown and Gray Sparrowy Birds 



Female— W-^LS, obscure dusky bars on the tail. 



Range — Labrador to Panama ; westward to Rocky Mountains. 



Migrations — May. September. Summer resident. 



" O cuckoo ! sIliII I call thee bird ? 

 Or but a wandering voice ? " 



From the tangled shrubbery on the hillside back of Dove 

 Cottage, Keswick, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy 

 listened for the coming of this "darling of the spring" ; in the 

 willows overhanging Shakespeare's Avon ; from the favorite 

 haunts of Chaucer and Spenser, where 



" Runneth nieade and springeth blede," 



we hear the cuckoo calling ; but how many on this side of the 

 Atlantic are familiar with its American counterpart } Here, too, 

 the cuckoo delights in running' water and damp, cloudy weather 

 like that of an English spring; it haunts the willows by our river- 

 sides, where as yet no "immortal bard" arises to give it fame. 

 It "loud sings " in our shrubbery, too. Indeed, if we cannot study 

 our bird afield, the next best place to become acquainted with 

 it is in the pages of the English poets. But due allowance must 

 be made for differences of temperament. Our cuckoo is scarcely 

 a " merry harbinger" ; his talents, such as they are, certainly are 

 not musical. However, the guttural cluck is not discordant, and 

 the black-billed species, at least, has a soft, mellow voice that 

 seems to indicate an embryonic songster. " K-k-k-k, kow-kow- 

 ow-kow-ow ! " is a familiar sound in many localities, but the large, 

 slim, pigeon-shaped, brownish-olive bird that makes it, securely 

 hidden in the low trees and shrubs that are its haunts, is not 

 often personally known. Catching a glimpse only of the grayish- 

 white under parts from where we stand looking up into the tree 

 at it, it is quite impossible to tell the bird from the yellow-billed 

 species. When, as it flies about, we are able to note the red 

 circles about its eyes, its black bill, and the absence of black tail 

 feathers, with their white "thumb-nail" spots, and see no bright 

 cinnamon feathers on the wings (the yellow-billed specie's dis- 

 tinguishing marks), we can at last claim acquaintance with the 

 black-billed cuckoo. Our two common cuckoos are so nearly 

 alike that they are constantly confused in the popular mind and 

 very often in the writings of ornithologists. At first glance the 



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