118 CUCKOO 
Man is, in my experience, about the last week in April, and 
with this agrees Mr. Kermode, whose earliest notes are 
22nd and 28th of that month. It has, however, been several 
times reported a fortnight earlier, and a remarkable record, 
if correct, is that from Langness lighthouse, where in 1887 
one was recorded on 28th March. Mr. Crellin says that old 
Manx people ‘ fixed’ the date for first hearing the Cuckoo 
on 23rd April. It appears from time to time, seemingly 
always singly, in the Manx migration reports (one was 
caught at Langness 4th May 1885, but the other dates are 
normal). : i 
The Cuckoo is common and well distributed. In May 
1901 we saw two together on the Calf of Man, and in 
August 1904 Mr. F. Nicholson found there remains of a 
Cuckoo in red plumage, which had been the victim of some 
bird of prey. It seems specially to love the borders of the 
waste land, and never does the well-known cry carry with it 
a stronger sense of the exhilaration of the season when the 
life of the world is renewed, than when the caller sways on 
the yet leafless bough of some wind-sown ash high on the 
side of a Manx glen, half wild, half pastoral, where beneath 
the stream rushes through a copse of brier and flowering 
blackthorn, sown thick with primrose and anemone, and 
vocal with the song of the Blackbird, and above, the long 
slopes of pasture merge in swells of grey waste, descending 
from one of the cairn-topped summits of the central range. 
Mr. Barker, as quoted by Mr. Kermode, heard two calling 
together when on the wing on the banks of the Sulby; and 
on 22nd May 1884, while a pair was in company on the 
Onchan uplands, I heard from them, while flying, both the 
usual ‘cuckoo’ and the singular gurgling sound attributed 
to the female. (I cannot say that each bird uttered both 
notes.) Mr. Kermode notes that he has heard it as late as 
12.45 and as early as 2.30 A.M. 
