34 CUCULID.E. 



may be easily washed off with cold water, and are so extremely delicate 

 that their purity is lost on the egg being taken into the hand. The 

 young birds hatched from these lovely eggs are proverbial for their 

 ugliness, Pichon de Urraca being a term of contempt commonly applied 

 to a person remarkable for want of comeliness. They are as unclean 

 as they are ugly, so that the nest, usually containing six or seven young, 

 is pleasant neither to sight nor smell. There is something ludicrous in 

 the notes of these young birds, resembling, as they do, the shrill half- 

 hysterical laughter of a female exhausted by over-indulgence in mirth. 

 One summer there was a large brood in a tree close to my home, and 

 every time we heard the parent bird hastening to her nest with food in 

 her beak, and uttering her plaintive cries, we used to run to the door 

 to hear them. As soon as the old bird reached the nest they would 

 burst forth into such wild extravagant peals and continue them so long, 

 that we could not but think it a rare amusement to listen to them. 



According to Azara the Guira Cuckoo in Paraguay has very friendly 

 relations with the Ani (Crotophaga ant), the birds consorting together 

 in one flock, and even laying their eggs in one nest ; and he affirms that 

 he has seen nests containing eggs of both species. These nests were 

 probably brought to him by his Indian collectors, who were in the 

 habit of deceiving him, and it is more than probable that in this matter 

 they were practising on his credulity; though it is certain that birds of 

 different species do sometimes lay in one nest, as I have found the 

 Common Teal and the Tinamou. for instance. I also doubt very much 

 that the bird is ever polygamous, as Azara suspected ; but it frequently 

 wastes eggs, and its procreant habits are sometimes very irregular and 

 confusing, as the following case will show : 



A flock numbering about sixteen individuals passed the winter in the 

 trees about my home, and in spring scattered about the plantation, 

 screaming and chattering in their usual manner when about to breed. 

 I watched them, and found that after a time the flock broke up into 

 small parties of three or four, and not into couples, and I could not 

 detect them building. At length I discovered three broken eggs on the 

 ground, and on examining the tree overhead found an incipient nest 

 composed of about a dozen sticks laid crossways and out of which the 

 eggs had been dropped. This was in October, and for a long time no 

 other attempt at a nest was made; but wasted eggs were dropped in 

 abundance on the ground, and I continued finding them for about four 

 months. Early in January another incipient nest was found, and on 

 the ground beneath it six broken eggs. At the end of that month two 

 large nests were made, each nest by one pair of birds, and in the two 

 fourteen or fifteen young birds were reared. 



