272 Cuculidw. 



nest, but depositing its eggs singly in those of other birds, insec- 

 tivorous species being almost always selected for the foster-parents, 

 is well known. Why the Cuckoos adopt this peculiar and almost 

 unnatural habit ; how they deposit their eggs in the nests of 

 little birds, when the situation and size of the nests preclude, as 

 they often do, the possibility of the egg being laid there, after 

 the usual manner, by a bird so disproportionate in size to the 

 nest it selects as the cradle for its young; how the young 

 Cuckoo becomes the sole tenant of the nest, its foster-brethren 

 being summarily expelled to make way for its rapidly increasing 

 size, and to enable its foster-parents to supply its voracious 

 appetite ; how the young Cuckoo, when come to maturity, follows 

 instinctively in the track of its parents, not being arrived at the 

 requisite point of strength when its parents leave their summer 

 haunts to accompany them on their annual migration south- 

 wards ; and more especially how Cuckoo's eggs, varying from one 

 another in colour, frequently resemble very closely the eggs of 

 the birds in whose nests they are respectively laid these and 

 other similar questions connected with its strange history, I 

 have examined in a paper which I read before the Wiltshire 

 Archaeological and Natural History Society at Salisbury in 1865, 

 and printed in the Wiltshire Magazine;* and from this I purpose 

 now to extract the more important portions, and to enter some- 

 what minutely into the economy and life-history of this singular 

 bird. For perhaps of all the commoner species with which we 

 are surrounded in the summer, there is not one of whose habits 

 so much misconception is abroad ; certainly there is not one in 

 which everybody evinces such extraordinary interest. Let me 

 begin, then, by refuting and clearing out of the way some of the 

 popular errors about it. 



It is even now a very common belief, handed down from 

 the time of Aristotle, that the Cuckoo changes in the 

 course of the summer into a hawk ; while Pliny,t who wrote 

 on Natural History, gravely asserted (and that assertion is 

 still upheld by many in these days) that the young Cuckoo 

 Vol. x., pp. 115-130. t Nat. Hist. (lib. x., cap. 9). 



