Life- History of the Cuckoo. 



123 



for such a monster, but is forced to vacate it, and sits perched on 

 the edge, while the foster parents, unable to reach up to it from 

 below, alight on its back in order to feed it. 1 It is at this period 

 of its existence that the young Cuckoo is said to possess, or to 

 acquire for a time, the note of its foster parents, 2 whatever it may 

 happen to be : but this point in its history requires corroboration, 

 as, though asserted by many, it has never yet been satisfactorily 

 settled. And then again when they have at length attained their 

 full size, the young Cuckoos, though left to their own devices, and 

 without their elders for their guides, as all other migratory birds 

 have, follow towards the end of September, in the track of their 

 parents which have gone long before, and migrate to a warmer 

 clime : though what instinct teaches them when to go, and whither 

 to bend their course, who shall say ? Indeed to my mind this is 

 one of the most astonishing points in their life-history which we 

 have now touched upon. 



And now I come to the most remarkable peculiarity of all : and 

 indeed amongst these so many anomalies which we have seen to 

 belong to this extraordinary bird, (and the more one studies its 

 habits, the more numerous, and the more apparent do they become) 

 there is nothing so strange or indeed so startling as the opinion 

 put forth, as I said just now, in Germany by Dr. Baldamus, and 

 afterwards followed up and demonstrated by proofs of apparently 

 the most satisfactory character, on the part of himself and his 

 friends ; that the Cuckoo, while she lays her eggs singly in the 

 nests of other birds, is able to assimilate them in colour to the eggs of 

 those birds whose nests she selects : 3 and thus it is by no means an 

 uncommon occurrence to see the egg of the Cuckoo taken from a 

 Hedge-sparrow's nest, partaking of a greenish blue tinge ; another 

 from the nest of a Robin of a reddish hue ; another from a Pipit's 

 nest of a brownish colour ; and so on through the twenty or thirty 

 species, in whose nests the egg of the Cuckoo has been found. 



hardener's Chronicle, 1851, p. 469. Mag. Nat. Hist. vol. ix., p, 638. 

 Naturalist 1851, p. 132, 1852, p. 33. 



2 Thompson's Nat. Hist, of Ireland, vol. i., p. 361. 

 3 Zoologist, 3988. 



