NOTES ON SOME STATEMENTS OF NEWTON. 183 



sex. The appearance of the Cuckoo, Newton further states, is a 

 signal " for all the small birds of the neighbourhood to be up in 

 its pursuit, just as though it were a Hawk, to which indeed its 

 mode of flight and general appearance give it an undoubted 

 resemblance." In this district and many other districts I have 

 visited, especially in the neighbourhood of vast moorlands, the 

 Cuckoo is not much mobbed nor harried by a great variety of 

 small birds, other than the Titlark, this being the species which 

 is most victimised by the Cuckoo in such districts. I hardly 

 think that small birds mistake the Cuckoo for a Hawk ; indeed, 

 their behaviour in the presence of the Cuckoo is altogether 

 different from their behaviour in the presence of a Sparrow- 

 Hawk, and the mode of flight of the latter species is quite unlike 

 the Cuckoo's. When the Titlark is in the presence of the 

 Cuckoo, it evinces more curiosity than fear. 



Newton dismisses as a vulgar and seemingly groundless 

 belief the idea that Cuckoos suck the eggs of other kinds of 

 birds, but the accumulated facts in presumption of this habit 

 hardly warrants him in dismissing this subject in such a 

 summary fashion. This habit, however,, may be chiefly confined 

 to the female, and to those nests into which it foists one or 

 more of its own eggs. When the Cuckoo introduces its egg into 

 the nest of its dupe, one egg of the fosterer almost always 

 mysteriously disappears ; and I have never known the nest in 

 which two eggs of the Cuckoo have been laid to contain the full 

 complement of eggs of the fosterer. 



Beferring to the Spotted Flycatcher (Muscicapa grisola), 

 Newton writes that this species is one of the latest of our 

 migrants, which is quite accurate, but he goes on to say that it 

 seldom reaches these islands before the latter part of May. 

 Even in Yorkshire it not unfrequently arrives at the end of 

 April, and is here usually in full numbers by the middle of May. 



Writing of the Pied Flycatcher {M. atricapilla), it is said 

 that this species is more numerous in the Lake District than 

 elsewhere in England, but I am not quite so certain whether it 

 is not more numerous in some parts of Yorkshire. Newton does 

 not mention its occurrence in Wales, but in some parts of the 

 Conway Valley I have found it more numerous than in any other 

 part of the British Isles. 



