262 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



April, it could not be a bird of the year ; but it apparently did 

 not occur to him that it might have been a bird of the previous 

 year which had not yet moulted. 



Examples in this hepatic plumage are of rare occurrence in 

 England, for the reason that young Cuckoos, after leaving this 

 country, moult in their winter quarters before returning to their 

 summer haunts. 



Mr. Dresser, who has naturally referred to this subject in his 

 ' Birds of Europe ' (vol. v. p. 200), but who like others is in error 

 in supposing that the hepatic plumage is confined to the female 

 Cuckoo, describes one (which happened to be a female) shot by 

 Mr. W. T. Blanford near Shiraz, in Persia, in May, 1870 ; and 

 another in his collection that was obtained at Hampstead, also in 

 the month of May, "in change between this plumage and the 

 grey dress of the adult bird." 



Messrs. Gurney and Fisher have recorded the occurrence of 

 a red Cuckoo on the 5th of May at Letton, in Norfolk,* and sub- 

 sequently it appears that a second example came under Mr. 

 Gurney's notice in the same county .f 



One shot at Doddington, in Kent, about 1850, is preserved in 

 the Cambridge Museum, and is noticed by Prof. Newton in his 

 article on the Cuckoo, published in September, 1881, in the 4th 

 edition of Yarrell's * British Birds' (vol. ii. p. 407). 



So long ago as 1866, in the first book which I ventured to 

 publish, viz.> ' The Birds of Middlesex,' — the precursor of so 

 many county avifaunas, — I remarked upon the rarity in this 

 country of what I then supposed to be adult Cuckoos in the 

 reddish-brown plumage. Two examples then known to me were 

 supposed to be adult because they had been obtained in spring, 

 and because, strange to say, one of them was reported to have 

 been observed in the same neighbourhood for three summers, and 

 the other for five or six. At the present time this strikes me as 

 an extraordinary statement to have made, though I well remember 

 that it was so made on the authority of an excellent ornithologist, 

 the late Frederick Bond.J Since that date until the present time 

 I have never seen another example of a red Cuckoo obtained in 



* "Account of Birds found in Norfolk" (Zool. 1846, p. 1815). 



f Stevenson, ' Birds of Norfolk,' vol. i. p. 809. 



J See the memoir of him (Zool. 1889, pp. 401-422). 



