THE GIFTS OF AUGUST 19 



season begin to throb in the frosty air, the bird- 

 lover finds himself straining an attuned ear for the 

 call of the Pallid Cuckoo. He has not long to wait. 

 Be it wet or fine, the airy voice of this Ishmael of 

 the bird-world will certainly be heard before the 

 month is out, and its cumbersome form "floppy," 

 a critical girl has called it with its attendant bevy 

 of resentful smaller species, will be seen bunched 

 upon fence, telegraph line, or any other point of 

 vantage in the sunlit woods. 



I can find nought of intrinsic melody in this 

 Cuckoo-voice, or, indeed, in the call of any of its 

 close relatives. But the leisurely, throaty strain, if 

 it has not the blitheness that poets have found in 

 the wandering voice of the famous bird of the old 

 world, has a persuasive quality of its own at this 

 time o' year, something that speaks without, shall 

 we say ? attempting to do so of pulsing life in sun- 

 warmed fields. The Winter of 1909 was exception- 

 ally wet in Victoria, but not sufficiently so to repress 

 this herald of the Spring. On the twelfth day of 

 August there rang out, clear and high above a fac- 

 tory which endured my services, the invitation of a 

 Pallid Cuckoo. No shades of a prison-house closed 

 about one growing boy that afternoon ; he was out 

 along a bush railroad superintending a disagreement 

 between a philosophic grey Cuckoo and a host of 

 excited Honeyeaters! 



The smaller Bronze Cuckoo I have found to be 

 less definite in its time of arrival, my earliest record 

 for Central Victoria being the eighth of July. On 

 that date in the forebodingly dry 1914, as I read 

 Burroughs on Cuckoos in a sun-streaked bush recess, 



