A YOUNG CUCKOO 61 



nest. If the act were instinctive, it should in this 

 case have been performed earlier. 



In the matter of instinct, however, one has to 

 watch but little to discover evidence of intelligence 

 in actions that might well be supposed to be 

 governed by instinct alone. Thus, these Meadow- 

 pipits brought to the Cuckoo great long-legged flies 

 that would have choked their own offspring. They 

 must, therefore, have recognised the inadequacy of 

 the food they would have collected instinctively for 

 their own young, to meet the needs of their present 

 sturdier charge. 



Desiring, among other things, to hear the natural 

 note of the young Cuckoo, I decided to spend a full 

 day at the nest. Hitherto the bird had been silent, 

 emitting no sound save under provocation a kind 

 of suffocated click in the throat when battling with 

 my finger, and the shrill, repeated scream of baffled, 

 but undaunted rage when thoroughly overborne. 



I had read in Blackwall's " Researches in Zoology" 

 " the chirp of the young Cuckoos is the same, as 

 Dr. Jenner rightly observes, whatever the species of 

 their foster-parents may be ; hence it follows that it 

 is not learned from any other bird, but is exclusively 

 their own." 



I had not long to wait. Both birds fed the Cuckoo 

 continuously throughout the earlier part of the 

 morning ; perched, one or both, near by during the 

 middle of the day ; and resumed feeding during the 

 afternoon. My presence at the nest in the morning 

 broke through their domestic routine, and one or the 

 other of the birds would come, and hovering a little 

 way above me with dangling legs, emit the usual 



