234 ^'** World-Evidence. 



There are no doubt some good points about the 

 American cuckoos, though most assuredly they do 

 not he in the direction Professor Alfred Newton and 

 Dr. Bowdler Sharpe would point us, especially after 

 what Darwin himself had said in the eighth chapter 

 of his Origin of Species ! 



Let us do them all the justice that we can. They 

 are first of all very devoted to each other in the 

 period of brooding. 



Mr. O. Widmann thus makes record of an observa- 

 tion on 1 2th May, 1894, to this effect regarding the 

 yellow-billed cuckoo whilst brooding : 



" The female, at this particular period of her life 

 and love, seems to care little for other food than that 

 which her courteous and attentive mate provides for 

 her. She keeps quietly sitting in all her loneliness, 

 as if lost in pleasant reverie, patiently awaiting his 

 return. In the exuberance of his affection, instead of 

 taking a seat at her side, as other birds would do, he 

 gracefully alights on her shoulders, slightly spreads 

 his wings as if in embrace, bends forward over her 

 head and puts into her open bill the tender willow-fly, 

 an ephemera of larger size." ■•'■ 



And, secondly, they seem to have more possibilities 

 of being tamed and trained than our cuckoos, if we 

 may judge by a record pubhshed by Mr. Koumly, of 

 Seneca, Kansas, communicated to the American Or- 

 nithologists' Union Journal, 1893, p. 368, where he 

 told of these birds frequenting houses and buildings. 

 " A female yellow-billed cuckoo herself frequently 

 visited the college chapel of St. Benedict's, Atcheson, 

 Kansas. She was not flying about when I saw her, 



*Auk, 1895, P- 114- 



