HEPATIC PLUMAGE OF THE CUCKOO. 261 



scribed by many other authors, amongst them by Selby and by 

 Yarrell, and yet on one point these two authors are at variance. 

 Selby remarks (111. Orn. vol. i. p. 401) : — "The young females 

 have more of the reddish brown disposed over their plumage, and 

 have little or no appearance of the white patch upon the forehead 

 and hind part of the head. In this plumage, and till after the 

 second moult, they answer to Cuculus hepaticus." 



From Professor Newton's statement of the case in the fourth 

 volume of Yarrell's 'British Birds ' (vol. i. p. 407) we are led to 

 infer that in the plumage described by Selby the bird is Cuculus 

 rufus, and that the term hepaticus is applicable to the nest- 

 ling stage. I am inclined to consider Selby's view the more 

 correct. The subject is a puzzling one, and it is complicated by 

 Temminck's notion that rufus and hepaticus indicate one and the 

 same phase of plumage, which is not the nestling stage, but a 

 stage intermediate between that and the adult plumage. 



We have then to consider what change takes place in a young 

 Cuckoo between its leaving this country in autumn and returning 

 to us in the following spring. Does it moult twice in seven 

 months, between September and April, i. e., first from the nest- 

 ling plumage into the hepatic stage, and secondly from the latter 

 into the adult grey plumage ? This does not seem likely. It is 

 more probable that the hepatic condition is reached without any 

 moult, merely by the growth of the feathers and gradual wearing 

 off of their tips in autumn,* and then by a moult of the hepatic 

 plumage in the succeeding spring the adult plumage is assumed. 

 In this way only does it seem possible to account for a pheno- 

 menon hitherto unexplained. If this view be correct, a red Cuckoo 

 in England in April will be one that has completed on the Con- 

 tinent its nestling or first year's plumage (which it does not stay 

 long enough to do in this country), but which has not gone 

 through the spring moult that would transform it into the grey 

 plumage of the adult bird. Just such a bird as this was shot in 

 April under Mount Lebanon by Mr. Cochrane. Canon Tristram, 

 in a paper on the Birds of Palestine (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1864, 

 p. 432), described it with diffidence as a new species, Cuculus 

 libanoticus, chiefly on the ground that, having been obtained in 



* See Meves, " On the Change of Colour in Birds through and irrespective 

 of Moultiug" (Zool. 1879, pp. 81—89). 



