i8 Life History of Common Cuckoo. 



tained five eggs, four belonging to this bird and one 

 to the cuckoo. I visited the nest again on the 8th 

 June, and found three young hedge - accentors and 

 the cuckoo hatched, one of the hedge-accentor's eggs 

 having disappeared ; the three young hedge-accen- 

 tors lay on one side of the nest, the cuckoo on the 

 other by itself. On the morning of the following day 

 I once more went to the nest ; the three accentors 

 were gone, and the cuckoo was the sole occupant. 

 One of the accentors lay dead on the ground below 

 the nest. On the loth June I saw the foster parents 

 feeding the cuckoo. 



"When the egg of the cuckoo is not hatched, the 

 young of the foster birds are reared. In 1870, I met 

 with a case in point ; the nest contained two eggs of 

 the hedge-accentor and one of the cuckoo ; after a 

 day or two the accentors w^ere hatched. I continued 

 to watch for several days, in the hope that the 

 cuckoo's egg would be hatched, but it proved to be 

 addled. The parents fed their little brood with great 

 attention and neither they nor the young took any 

 notice of the unhatched egg, which lay sometimes 

 above, and sometimes below the nestlings."''' 



Fourteen years later Mr. Hancock described obser- 

 vations corresponding exactly to those of Mrs. 

 Blackburn. 



He tells that he had often tried to find opportunities 

 of observing this marvellous performance. 



" I began in June, 1884, at Oatlands, Surrey," he 

 writes, *' to search the grounds carefully for as many 

 nests as I could find that were likely to have cuckoos' 

 eggs in them, and was fortunate enough to discover 



* Catalogue of the Birds of Northumberland, pp. 26, 27. 



