208 
THE CUCKOO’S SECRET 
previously found in the nest. Probably this has 
been put down to some considerate collector who 
has contented himself with the abstraction of a 
single egg, but in at least many instances the 
abstraction has been the action of the bird itself. 
My brother and I well recollect seeing a Shrike 
return to her nest of fresh eggs, which we had just 
found, and set to work to suck them ; and con- 
stantly, after finding Shrikes’ nests with incomplete 
clutches, upon paying a subsequent visit we have 
found all the eggs gone and the interior of the 
nest “ roughed up,” this clearly having been done 
by the bird, the state of the hedge showing un- 
mistakably that no one else had visited the nest. 
In the record of my experiences of Cuckoo A 
in 1920, in each of the two cases when the Cuckoo 
remained beside the nest of the fosterer for ten 
and thirty-one minutes respectively, she was seen 
to leave the nest without an egg in her beak, 
contrary to what had been noticed on other days, 
when her visits to the nest of her fosterers had 
occupied a matter of seconds rather than minutes. 
And yet on immediately going to the nest we 
found that in exchange for her own egg left in the 
nest, the Cuckoo had removed one of the eggs of 
the fosterer, which had been counted in the nest 
