186 LAND BIRDS 
a second set is laid in another nest, and for this the 
unfortunate bird sometimes occupies the abandoned 
nests of other birds. There is no authentic record of 
her having left her own eggs to be brooded by another, 
however, and the accusation of parasitic parenthood is, 
in her case, unjust. It belongs rather to the European 
species. 
Always shy haunters of the willow thickets, cuckoos 
are most apt to be heard during the mating season, 
which varies from May, in San Bernardino County, 
where they are more or less scarce, to the last of August 
in Sacramento valley, although a brood of the latter 
date, as noted by Major Bendire, undoubtedly was a 
belated one. 
The only brood of the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo 
that I have watched develop was housed in a willow 
clump in Santa Clara valley. The last of three pale 
green eggs was laid May 30, and incubation began the 
next day. For eighteen days the slim brown mother 
brooded ; and when, at the end of that time, three wrig- 
gling, naked birdlings filled the nest, her watchful care 
was doubled. Noiselessly as a shadow she would slip 
through the low bushes with a cricket in her bill, and 
during the early hours of the morning one or the other 
of the parents was en route continually with food for the 
hungry but silent nestlings. These were fed by regurgi- 
tation at first, and they grew surprisingly as the days 
went by. At the end of twenty days they were covered 
with pinfeathers and looked like tiny porcupines. Sud- 
denly, on the twenty-first day, these sheaths burst, and 
