144 THE CUCKOO 



throat, Wagtail, or some other, and thereupon begins to 

 place her egg in this. When she finds that she cannot 

 get into a nest of a bird which builds in a hole, she 

 lays her egg on the ground, then takes it up in her bill 

 and drops it into the nest. 



In spring and summer the Cuckoo's note sounds all 

 through Great Britain. Its ways will always have a fas- 

 cination both for the old and the young. Many will be 

 surprised to hear that scientists have now verified the 

 placing of its eggs in the nests of as- many as 145 species; 

 in different countries, that is, including the nests of the 

 Isabelline and other Chats in Africa and China, and the 

 Red-headed Bunting on the steppes of Turkestan. In 

 Lapland the Grey-headed Wagtail and the Red-spotted 

 Bluethroat are the foster-parents; in Andalusia the 

 Great-spotted Cuckoo lays oftenest in the nest of the 

 Spanish Magpie.* The old poet, Quarles, must have 

 seen the bird with an egg in its beak when he wrote 

 ' The idle Cuckoo having made a feast of Sparrow's 

 eggs, Lays down her own i' the nest." 



A German authority, Dr. Rey, made a collection -of 

 over seven hundred Cuckoo's eggs; and he states that 

 the proportion of those which resemble in colouring 

 those of the foster-parents is only about thirty per cent. 

 Yet out of sixty-seven which he took from a Redstart's 

 nest fifty-seven were blue. Another collector again 

 states that only one blue Cuckoo's egg had passed 

 through his hands. Lately a man told me of having 

 found two Cuckoo's eggs in one small nest, an unusual 



* Mr. Wells Bladen, of Stone, wrote an interesting brochure on 

 this subject. 



