14 MOUNTAIN AND MOORLAND 



more than a touch of romance. But we must get on 

 with our walk. 



The glens on this range are in the springtime quite 

 lively with Cuckoos, but these naughty birds have been 

 silent for weeks now, and the parents, without their 

 children, will soon be leaving for the South. Is there 

 any more puzzling bird ? The mother lays an egg on 

 the ground, takes it up in her mouth, flies along the 

 hedgerow or meadow with it, and deposits it in the 

 foster-parent's nest. The Cuckoo's egg is often con- 

 spicuously unlike the foster-parent's and there are 

 scores of different foster-parents but sometimes it is 

 like an exact copy in colour and pattern and every- 

 thing save the texture of the shell. Long before the 

 young Cuckoos are ready to leave our shores, the 

 parent birds, who evade parental responsibilities, have 

 migrated. Among all our migrants this is the only 

 case in which the seniors leave our shores first in their 

 flight southwards. How do their offspring find their 

 way, especially when their foster-parent is not a 

 migrant? Why do little birds combine to mob a 

 Cuckoo ? Can they really think that it is like a hawk ? 

 Then the nestling is so strange. It is so sensitive for 

 the first eleven days in a hollow on its back that a touch 

 provokes a violent shrugging and struggling. Every- 

 one knows that this dog in the manger, if one may use 

 the term for a young bird, gets the foster-parent's eggs 

 on to its back and pitches one after another out of the 

 nest and that it will do the same to a fellow-nestling 

 belonging to the foster-parent. These are a few of the 

 Cuckoo puzzles that rise in our mind as we go up the 

 hill. They may be followed up in our "Secrets of 

 Animal Life " (London, 1919). 



