and Nests of the Cuckoo. 401 
touch them. As I had labourers constantly at work in that 
field, I went thither every day, and always looked if the bird 
was there; but did not disturb it for seven or eight days, 
when I was tempted to drive it from the nest, and found ¢wo 
young ones, that appeared to have been hatched for some 
days, but there was no appearance of the third egg. I then 
mentioned this extraordinary circumstance (for such I thought 
it) to Mr. and Mrs. Holyoak of Bidford Grange, Warwick- 
shire, and to Miss M. Willes, who were on a visit at my 
house, and who all went to see it. Very lately I reminded 
Mr. Holyoak of it, who told me he had a perfect recollection 
of the whole; and that, considering it a curiosity, he walked 
to look at it several times, was perfectly satisfied as to its being 
a cuckoo, and thought her more attentive to her young than 
any other bird he ever observed, having always found her 
brooding her young. In about a week after I first saw the 
young ones one of them was missing, and I rather suspected 
my ploughboys had taken it, though it might possibly have 
been taken by a hawk, some time when the old one was seek- 
ing food. I never found her off her nest but once, and that 
was the last time I saw the remaining young one, when it was 
almost full feathered. I then went from home for two or three 
days, and when I returned the young one was gone, which, 
I take for granted, had flown. ‘Though, during this time, I 
frequently saw cuckoos in the thicket I mention, I never saw 
the cock bird paired with this hen.” * 
Now, I cannot but think that the following remarks of Dr. 
Jenner leave no doubt that the nest observed by Mr. Wilmot, 
as well as that seen by Mr. Stafford, belonged not to the 
cuckoo, but the night-jar : — “ With due deference,” says Jen- 
ner, * to Dr. Darwin, I am inclined to think that the opinion 
he set forth respecting the training of cuckoos was taken up 
hastily ; and that the birds which his friend saw feeding their 
nestlings were not cuckoos but goatsuckers, whose mode of 
nestling corresponds with the relation given, and whose ap- 
pearance might be mistaken for them by one not perfectly 
conversant with the plumage and the general appearance of 
cuckoos when on the wing.” + 
The assertion of Aristotle, that the cuckoo sometimes builds 
among broken rocks and on high mountains {, and a similar 
remark quoted from Niphus by Gesner §, are no more to be 
trusted than his story of the redbreast being annually changed || 
* Darwin’s Zoonomia, i. 246., 3d edit. 8vo. 
+ Jenner in Philosophical Transactions for 1824, p. 42. 
} Aristotle, Hist. Anim. vi. 1. 
§ Gesner, Ade vibus, ii. || Pliny, 7Zlian, Salerne, &c. 
