360 cuculidjE. 



with the exception of the presence of some small sharp gravel, 

 was entirely empty, and was closely coated over with hair. 



" Attention was called to this, that the hair lining that 

 organ might be observed. From its close adhesion to the inner 

 surface of this stomach, and from the regularity with which it is 

 arranged, I was at first disposed to consider this hair as being of 

 spontaneous growth ; but part of the stomach having been sub- 

 jected to maceration in water, and afterwards viewed through a 

 microscope of high power, the hairs proved, to the entire -satis- 

 faction of Mr. [now Professor] Owen and myself, to be altogether 

 borrowed from the larvae of the tiger-moth, Arctia Caja, Schrank, 

 the only species found in the stomachs of several cuckoos * from 

 different parts of the north of Ireland, which I examined in the 

 months of May and June, 1833/' Proceedings Zool. Soc, 1834, 

 p. 29. 



An observant friend found the remains of coleopterous insects 

 in the stomach of a cuckoo, but does not remember whether this 

 was at a time when its favourite caterpillars are to be procured. 

 Mr. Poole remarks, that a young cuckoo which he shot on the 

 21st of July, "frequented a newly cut meadow, where it was 

 busily occupied looking for food among the swathes. Its stomach 

 was distended with caterpillars, together with some fibrous sub- 

 stance, like fine grass-stalks, some four inches long, and in consi- 

 derable quantity." An intelligent bird-preserver has remarked a 

 kind of tough gelatinous fat attached to the skin of the neck in 

 the cuckoo, which he has not seen in any other bird. 



I have several times known young cuckoos to have been kept 

 for some months in good health, until winter fairly set in, when 

 with two exceptions, they died.f Of the survivors, one lived for 



* The stomachs of all these were coated with hair like the one described. 



f Mr. Jas. R. Garrett has favoured me with the following note respecting one ob- 

 tained since the preceding was written : — 



"Belfast, Nov. 23rd, 1848. 



" I have at present in confinement a young cuckoo, which I took, on the 21st of June, 

 from the nest of a titlark. It was then in the plumage represented in the vignette 

 in vol. ii. p. 199 of Yarrell's Brit. Birds (2nd Ed.), with the exception that its wing and 

 tail-feathers were much longer. The titlarks were hovering about the nest when I 

 approached, and close to it I found one of their eggs, containing a half-formed young 

 bird in a stale of decomposition. For several weeks after the cuckoo was placed in 



