140 



NOTE ON A MEADOW= PIPIT'S NEST CONTAINING 

 TWO EGGS OF THE CUCKOO. 



C. T. TRECHMANN, 

 Castle Eden. 



On June loth, 1909, while walking over a large rough pasture 

 on the edge of a small stream near Castle Eden, I put up a 

 Meadow Pipit from her nest under a tuft of coarse grass. The 

 nest contained five eggs, two of which had something peculiar 

 about them. I took the whole nest and its contents home, and 

 found two eggs to be undoubtedly of the Cuckoo. I compared 

 them with the coloured figures in Seebohm's ' Eggs of British 

 Birds,' plate 49, and found one to correspond pretty closely 

 with the figure in the left-hand bottom corner, while the other 



Photo by] 



Meadow-Pipit's Nest with two Eggs of Cuckoo. 



[R. Fortune. 



(a smaller egg) was very like the figure above it on the right- 

 hand side. They seem certainly to belong to two different 

 birds, and the larger measures \%" by \^", and has a greyish 

 white ground colour, mottled with light mauve with darker 

 blotches. The smaller egg measures roughly |" by f", and is 

 more slender and has a greenish ground with light brown and 

 mauve mottling. Two of the meadow pipit's eggs are very 



Naturalist, 



