THE YELLOW-BILLED CUCKOO. 365 



so fearless, yet withal, so decorous. But nothing escapes him. He is not 

 so vulgarly devoted to curiosity that he forgets business. Mercy, no! You 

 may be within ten feet of him, but he plucks and swallows a caterpillar with 

 as little ado and apology as tho you were in the next county. But make a 

 false motion and the bird glides away into the deeper foliage with an ease 

 and grace born of long practice. Silken, silent, sinuous, are adjectives which 

 you instinctively apply to this sober, sly bird as he steals through the upper 

 branches, scarcely seen, but not unseeing, to emerge at length from the oppo- 

 site side of the tree and to dart away like a lithe brown arrow into some distant- 

 copse. 



The association of birds and seasons has nowhere a more striking exem- 

 plification than in the case of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo and the month of 

 August, at least here in central Ohio. The month belongs to the bird. 

 While other birds are hiding in the underbrush or sulking somewhere in the 

 shade, the Cuckoo is in the best of humor. It is then that he show r s himself 

 most freely as he reaps his staple harvest of tent caterpillars. Nesting has 

 been purposely deferred to late June, or even early August, in order that the 

 young might grow r during this time of greatest plenty. The bird's conduct 

 at this season is quite in contrast with his behavior in spring. Then he prob- 

 ably remained undiscovered until the end of the first week or the middle of 

 the second week in May, but it is almost certain that he had been in the coun- 

 try for a week or so. He had only been waiting for the novelty of the strange 

 land to wear off before he should venture to proclaim himself. This he does 

 by a series of explosive pouting notes, Cook, cook, cook, cook, cook, cook, 

 cook, cook, cook, delivered rather slowly, rallentando et diminuendo. 



The female Cuckoo is a rather slovenly nest builder, and nowise regular 

 in her habits. Nesting may be undertaken as early as the last week in May, 

 but I once found a nest with fresh eggs at this latitude on the i6th of August 

 the latter perhaps a second set. In construction the nest is usually little 

 more than a careless platform of small sticks lined with catkins, chiefly of 

 the oak. Occasionally twigs bearing green leaves are worked in to aid in 

 concealment. The location may be a thorn bush, black haw tree, or wild 

 plum thicket, or even an exposed horizontal branch well up in a forest tree. 

 The eggs are sometimes laid at intervals of three or four days, and incuba- 

 tion may commence with the deposition of the first egg. A nest may thus 

 contain at the same time growing young and fresh eggs, altho the latter are 

 likely to suffer from neglect or final ejectment. In keeping with this general 

 carelessness is an ancestral habit, not yet quite overcome, of occasionally im- 

 posing eggs upon foster parents. Thus, Dr. Jones of Circleville tells of 

 finding an egg of this bird in a Cardinal's nest, and another, which he thought 

 belonged to this species, among the eggs of a Catbird. 



That the Cuckoos are thoroughly useful birds the following quotation 



