CHAPTER XI 



The Yellow-Billed Cuckoo: Coccyzus Americanus 



IN SMALL THICKLY LEAVED TREES 



I love the Cuckoo. In this 

 taste there is much good com- 

 pany, for I could quote, to the 

 length of a chapter, poems and 

 songs by lovers of the bird. 

 Jraditions concerning it are al- 

 most as old and as mixed in fable 

 and legend as those of the King- 

 fisher. It is an individual bird 

 and its characteristics are sharply 



outlined. It is a bird that has been slandered by writers learned 

 in the lore of books, but wholly lacking in knowledge of the 

 woods and the actual habits of birds. 



There are charges against it of depositing its eggs in other 

 birds' nests, as do its European relatives. Surely in the length of 

 my life I have looked into as many birds' nests as any other one 

 person, but I never saw a Cuckoo egg that had been deposited 

 with any other species. It is charged with destroying the nests 

 and young of other birds; I never have seen a suspicion of this 

 characteristic in it, and I have yet to meet a real natural-history 

 worker, of the woods, who has. It is accused, by writers who 

 should know better, of having a filthy, repulsive nest and badly 



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