FOOD OF CUCKOOS. 
133 
Ordines and Genera are many of them new, expressive, and mas- 
terly. He has ventured to alter some of the Linnaean genera 
with sufficient show of reason. 
It might perhaps be mere accident that you saw so many 
swifts and no swallows at Staines ; because, in my long observa- 
tion of those birds, I never could discover the least degree of 
rivalry or hostility between the species. 
Ray remarks that birds of the gallince order, as cocks and 
hens, partridges, and pheasants, &c. are pulveratrices, such as 
dust themselves, using that method of cleansing their feathers, 
and ridding themselves of their vermin. As far as I can observe, 
many birds that dust themselves never wash : and I once thought 
that those birds that wash themselves would never dust ; but 
here I find myself mistaken ; for common house-sparrows are 
great pulveratrices, being frequently seen grovelling and wallow- 
ing in dusty roads ; and yet they are great washers. Does not 
the skylark dust ?* 
Query, Might not Mahomet and his followers take one me- 
thod of purification from these pulveratrices ^ because I find from 
travellers of credit that if a strict mussulman is journeying in a 
sandy desert where no water is to be found, at stated hours he 
strips off his clothes, and most scrupulously rubs his body over 
with sand or dust. 
A countryman told me he had found a young fern-owl in the 
nest of a small bird on the ground ; and that it was fed by the 
little bird. I went to see this extraordinary phenomenon, and 
found that it was a young cuckoo hatched in the nest of a tit- 
lark : it was become vastly too big for its nest, appearing 
in tenui re 
Majores pennas nido extendisse 
and was very fierce and pugnacious, pursuing my finger, as I 
teazed it, for many feet from the nest, and sparring and buffet- 
ting with its wings like a game-cock. The dupe of a dam ap- 
peared at a distance, hovering about with meat in its mouth, and 
expressing the greatest solicitude. 
In July I saw several cuckoos skimming over a large pond; 
and found, after some observation, that they were feeding on the 
libellulcB, or dragon-flies ; some of which they caught as they set- 
tled on the weeds, and some as they were on the wing. Notwith- 
* It does so, and never bathes ; and the same holds with its congener the wood-lark ; whereas 
all the pipit genus {anthus) are verj' partial to bathing, — Ed, 
