A CAPTIVE CUCKOO 187 



related by Benjamin Kidd in his posthumous 

 book, A Philosopher with Nature. The bird was a 

 pet cuckoo which had been reared from the nest, 

 and he gives the following account of its action: 



As the year waned and the time for the migration of my young 

 cuckoo approached and passed, its behaviour grew interesting. 

 The bird always became very restless in the evening. Being 

 much attached to me, it generally settled at last so as to be near 

 me, on the stationery case on the table on which I was writing, 

 in the dim light thrown by the upper surface of the green shade 

 of the reading-lamp by which I worked. Here, as the hours wore 

 on, the same thing happened every night. After a short interval 

 the muscles of the wing began to quiver, this action being to all 

 appearance involuntary. The movement gradually increased, 

 the bird otherwise remaining quite still, until it grew to a noise- 

 less but rapid fanning motion of the kind one sees in a moth 

 when drying its wings on emerging from its chrysalis. This 

 movement tended to grow both in degree and intensity, and it 

 usually lasted as long as I sat up during the night. In the early 

 stages of this mood the bird responded when I spoke to it ; but 

 in time it ceased to do this, and became lost in a kind of trance, 

 with eyes open and wings ceaselessly moving. Brain, muscles, 

 nervous system; and will, all seemed inhibited by the stimulus 

 that excited it. The bird became, as it were, locked in the passion 

 of that sense by which the movements of flying was thus simu- 

 lated. It was one of the strangest sights I have ever witnessed. 

 This young migratory creature of the air, which had never been 

 out of my house and which had never known any of its kind, 

 sitting beside me in the gloom of our northern winter and in the 

 dim lamplight, and by a kind of inherited imagination, in one 

 sense, flying through the night, leagues long, over lands and 

 oceans it had never seen. 



I should say that the rapid motion of the wings 

 as in flying gave relief to the bird, just as I believe 

 that when the migrant is once launched on his pass- 

 age, flying with all his power, he finds relief from the 

 sting of the impulse, and its accompanying sense of 

 disquiet or fear. And no doubt fatigue, hunger and 



