52 Life History of Common Cuckoo. 



" Since going to press, I have seen, through the 

 kindness of Mr. Seebohm, some specimens of cuckoo's 

 eggs coloured in imitation of those belonging to the 

 birds in the nests of which they are laid. There can 

 be no question about the imitation." 



Dr. Baldamus, in Naumannia, vol. for 1863-4, (P- 

 414), gives sixteen coloured drawings of eggs of com- 

 mon cuckoo— all very different indeed, from the blue 

 of the redstart and hedge-sparrow and pied fly-catcher 

 to the brown-blotched eggs of larks and pipits. 



The late-lamented Mr. Henry Seebohm, on the 

 whole a careful observer, despite Professor Newton's 

 depreciation, as well as an exquisite writer, in his 

 plates of birds' eggs, appended to his History of 

 British Birds, gives fifteen cuckoo's eggs which vary 

 through a wide range, one or other of which might 

 fairly simulate the eggs of the hedge-sparrows, red- 

 starts, pipits, fly-catchers, warblers, little buntings, 

 wagtails, tits, and some of the finches, wrens, and 

 blackcaps. One of these has undoubtedly a blue tint 

 which would make it admirably adapted to impose 

 even upon the redstart, or the pied fiy-catcher, or the 

 accentor — pace Mr. Luke Ellis, who in the Echo 

 some years ago, ridiculed the idea that a cuckoo 

 could lay a blue egg. But Mr. Seebohm was of 

 another mind. He wrote : 



" A cuckoo which lays blue eggs always lays blue 

 eggs, and its descendants will continue to lay blue 

 eggs ; it was probably hatched in a nest containing 

 blue eggs, and will, to the best of its ability, intrust 

 the care of its eggs to foster-parents of the same 

 species as those which tended it in its infancy. . . • 

 It is very seldom that the cuckoo's egg is found with- 



