NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



75 



The places they choose to lay their eggs are the nests of wag- 

 tails, titlarks, &c., and other " soft meat " birds. Mr. Davy 

 has never found the cuckoo's egg or young in any other than a 

 " soft meat " bird's nest. 



As regards the way in which the young cuckoo turns the 

 young of its foster parents out of the nest, Mr. Gould writes as 

 follows in his " Introduction to the Birds of Great Britain : "- 



" A lady of considerable ability as an observer of nature and as 

 an artist has actually seen this act performed, and has illus- 

 trated her statement of the fact by a sketch taken at the time, ;i 

 tracing of which has been kindly sent to me by the Duke of 

 Argyll. The sketch was accompanied by Mrs. Blackburn's 

 account of the circumstance, which is here given from No. 124 

 of Nature. 



" The sketch itself seems to me to be the only addition I have 

 made to the admirable description given by Dr. Jenner in his 

 letter to John Hunter, printed in the ' Philosophical Trans- 

 actions ' for 1788 (vol. Ixxviii., pp. 225, 226.) 



"'The nest (which we watched last June, after finding the 

 cuckoo's egg in it) was that of the common meadow-pipit 

 (titlark, mosscheeper), and had two pipit's eggs besides that of 

 the cuckoo. It was below a heather bush, on the declivity of a 

 low abrupt bank on a Highland hill-side in Moidart. 



" ' At one visit the pipits were found to be hatched, but not the 

 cuckoo. At the next visit, which was after an interval of forty- 

 eight hours, we found the young cuckoo alone in the nest, and 

 both the young pipits lying down the bank about ten inches 

 from the margin of the nest, but quite lively after being warmed 

 in the hand. They were replaced in the nest beside the cuckoo, 

 which struggled about till it got its back under one of them, 

 when it climbed backwards directly up the open side of the nest, 

 and hitched the pipit from its back on to the edge. It then 

 stood quite upright on its legs, which were straddled wide apart, 

 with the claws firmly fixed halfway down the inside of the nest, 

 among the interlacing fibres of which the nest was woven, and, 

 stretching its wings wide apart and backwards, it elbowed the 

 pipit fairly over the margin so far that its struggles took it down 

 the bank instead of back into the nest. 



"'After this the cuckoo stood a minute or two, feeling back 

 with its wings, as if to make sure that the pipit was fairly 

 overboard, and then subsided into the bottom of the nest. 



" ' The cuckoo was perfectly naked, without a vestige of a 

 feather, or even a hint of future feathers ; its eyes were not yet 

 opened, and its neck seemed too weak to support the weight of 

 its head. The pipits had well-developed quills on the wings 



