194 THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 
CALIFORNIA CUCKOO 
Coccyzus americanus occidentalis (Ridgev.) 
By R. Bruce HorsFatt. 
You slender, shy and dovelike bird, 
All white and brownish gray, 
With rufous wings, black, spotted tail, 
Bill yellow half the way, 
You’re rarely seen, not often heard; 
Your “Kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk-coo,” 
Brings eager eyes to woodland glades 
To catch a glimpse of you. —A. E. B. 
The California Cuckoo is in every way but size the counterpart of 
the HKastern Yellow-billed Cuckoo, of which Miss Alice EH. Ball in her 
book, “A Year With the Birds,” gives a true word picture in the above 
beautiful little poem. Our Western bird is about one inch longer than 
the Eastern species being from 12.30 to 13.50 inches. The six-inch tail, 
composed of ten feathers of graduated length, each with a thumb- 
mark of white on the end, is the most conspicuous character for 
identification. 
Slender and tapering, and with extreme deliberateness in all its 
movements, the Cuckoo is exceedingly difficult to see as it moves 
about in the tree tops, and when it flies, its long slender body passes 
swiftly in a straight line to disappear in other cover. 
The nest, sometimes lined with dry grass or leaves, is a very 
slight platform of twigs placed in trees and bushes. There on that 
flimsy structure two to four light bluish green eggs are laid and it 
seems that only a miracle holds them in place. Certainly any quick 
nervous movement on the part of the brooding bird would send those 
eggs flying into space, but that’s just what the Cuckoo never does, 
it never makes a hurried nervous movement. Like other birds that 
mate for life, they are very devoted parents. 
Rare birds throughout most parts of Oregon, their presence is 
often unsuspected but for their call notes, a slow, whistled kow-kow- 
kow-kow, followed by the same note rapidly repeated six or seven 
times with a slight diminuendo. A simple variation of this is given 
at times, but always the same quality of tone—soft, round and 
mellow. This is supposed to presage rain, hence the name, sometimes 
given them, of “Rain Crow.” 
Inhabiting orchard tracts and willow bordered streams, they eat 
all sorts of insects, but the hairy caterpillar, known as the tent cater- 
pillar or tent worm, seems to be their favorite food. These caterpillars 
are the larvae of the Vanessa Antiope or Mourning Cloak Butterfly. 
This beautiful creature, having lived through the .winter in some 
warm crack or cranny, deposits her hexagonal eggs like a miniature 
ring of honeycomb about the twigs of our orchard trees—apples, 
cherries, plums and others, also on the wild fruit trees and willows. 
The eggs hatch in two weeks and the creatures live as a colony 
throughout the larval stage. Each crawler leaves in its track a thread 
of silk and the colony is soon covered with a beautiful, shimmering, 
waterproof tent. 
To this tent comes the cuckoo, and in a deliberate “don’t care if 
I do” sort of a way, devours the prickly squirming mass to the last 
individual, two to three hundred at a time. | 
Examinations of cuckoo’s stomachs have revealed them coated, 
like a piece of felt, with the prickly bristles of the Vanessa larva. 
