broke off into his natural song. Then, when the season of song

p issecl, he was silent and it was feared that he had come to grief.

However, he is again in his old haunts and again whistles daily,

but hardly with the force of last year. He has only begun in

April, instead of much earlier, and so possibly his voice may

gain strength. I should be interested to know if any of our

members are acquainted with similar instances. I may say that

the postman comes from six or seven miles distance, and passes

rapidly: which makes it more remarkable that the bird should

have acquired such perfect imitation of his whistle (jb).


3. I cannot help alluding here to the curious similarity

between the notes of the Cuckoo .and of an Australian Dove

( Geopelia humeralis). I do not do so as the least a propos of

these instances of imitation ; of course there is no mimicry

whatever here, simply a curious similarity, of which evidently

the birds of two very dissimilar races are conscious. I had for

seven years a peculiarly tame cock of this species of Dove,

variously called “ Bronze-necked ” and “ Barred-shouldered.”

He would latterly, almost to order, cuckoo for my headman, and

generally for me. The Cuckoos were evidently taken in, and

used to fly close to his aviary. One spring, the usual accounts of

a wonderfully early Cuckoo being heard, this time in Hereford¬

shire, appeared in some of the London papers ; they were

quotations from a Herefordshire newspaper. I enquired the

authority, and was informed that some masons, restoring a

church, had frequently and distinctly heard the Cuckoo on a hill

in my grounds. It was, of course, the Dove, whose voice from

his aviary on high ground was heard more than half a mile

away as the crow flies, across the Wye. Since the demise of this

favourite last autumn, his widow has begun to cuckoo, which she

rarely, if ever, did before. Yesterday (April 16th) I happened

to be close to her aviary, when, far below in the valley, I heard,

for the first time this year, the notes of the veritable Cuckoo—

she immediately answered, crying “ cuckoo ” twice. There is, I

believe, an old superstition that the chief occupation of the )^ear

is to be that which is the occupation when one hears the

Cuckoo for the first time. I hope aviculturists will not deem the

prospect of my year to be very unprofitable when I say that I

was making a Sabbatical tour round many aviaries !



(b) I have not the least doubt that this whistle was learnt by a young- bird when

learning its parent’s song, of which the nestling considered it a part. In like manner

there is a Blackbird here, born in my front garden about two years ago, which picked up,

as part of its performance, the first stanza of a well-known air (probably Irish) which a

Parrot next door constantly repeated.— A. G. B.



