Common Cuckoo. 279 



' In April the Cuckoo can sing her song by rote. 

 In June of ttimes she cannot sing a note. 

 At first, koo ; koo ; koo ; sings till can she do 

 At last, kooke, kooke, kooke, kooke ; six kookes to pne koo. 3 



By the beginning of August, then, the parent Cuckoos are gone 

 southwards ; but the young Cuckoo is notoriously a tedious nurse- 

 ling, and indeed, having to grow from the inmate of a very small 

 eggshell to a bird of considerable dimensions, requires time for 

 such development, and taxes to a very large extent the powers as 

 well as the assiduity of its foster-parents : by degrees this over- 

 grown infant not only fills the little nest which was never meant 

 for such a monster, but is forced to vacate it, and sits perched 

 on the edge, while the foster-parents, unable to reach up to it from 

 below, alight on its back in order to feed it.* It is at this period 

 of its existence that the young Cuckoo is said to possess, or to 

 acquire for a time, the note of its foster-parents,t whatever it may 

 happen to be ; but this point in its history requires corroboration, 

 as, though asserted by many, it has never yet been satisfactorily 

 settled. And then again, when they have at length attained their 

 full size, the young Cuckoos, though left to their own devices, 

 and without their elders for their guides, as all other migratory 

 birds have, follow towards the end of September in the track 

 of their parents which have gone long before, and migrate to a 

 warmer clime ; though what instinct teaches them when to go, 

 and whither to bend their course, who shall say ? Indeed, to my 

 mind this is one of the most astonishing points in their life- 

 history which we have yet touched upon. 



And now I come to the most remarkable peculiarity of all ; and 

 indeed, amongst these so many anomalies which we have seen to 

 belong to this extraordinary bird (and the more one studies its 

 habits, the more numerous and the more apparent do they 

 become), there is nothing so strange or indeed so startling as the 

 opinion put forth, in Germany by Dr. Baldamus, and afterwards 



* Gardener's Chronicle, 1851, p. 469. Magazine of Natural History, vol. ix., 

 p. 638. Naturalist, 1851, p. 233 ; 1852, p. 33. 



t Thompson's ' Natural History of Ireland,' vol. i., p. 361. 



