THE CUCKOO. 
359 
lark (Anthus pratensis) seems generally to be the receptacle of the 
cuckooes egg. George Ensor, Esq., of Ardress, comity of Armagh, 
in a communication to the Magazine of Natural History (vol. vi. 
p. 83), mentions a tenant's son having taken home a young cuckoo 
from a titlark's nest. “ Two wrens who had a nest with eight 
eggs in the eaves, and just above the window fronting the cage in 
which the cuckoo was placed, made their way through a broken 
pane, and continued to feed it for some time." The cuckoo was 
at length taken away, when “the wrens repaired to their own 
nest, and brought out the eggs that had been laid — we are not 
informed how long they were absent from it. At Bockport, near 
Belfast, a lady remarked, that when the cuckoo had attained 
such a size that its foster-parents could not reach up food, they 
alighted on its back to feed it. This proceeding was repeatedly 
observed from the windows of the house, near to which the nest 
was situated. The cuckoo is occasionally heard to call through 
the night, when fine, though there may be no moonlight. On 
the 8th of May, a dark morning, I noted that its call commenced 
at half-past three o'clock. It was once heard at the Balls on the 
16th of June, at a quarter past two o'clock in the morning. 
In April, 1834, I made the following communication to the 
Zoological Society of London : — 
“May 28th, 1833. — On examination to-day of three cuckoos, 
which were killed in the counties of Tyrone and Antrim within 
the last week, I found them all to be in different stages of plumage. 
One was mature ; — another (a female) exhibited on the sides of 
the neck and breast the reddish-coloured markings of the young 
bird, the remainder of the plumage being that of maturity ; — the 
third specimen had reddish markings disposed entirely over it, 
much resembling the plumage described by M. Temminck as as- 
sumed by Ges jeunes tels qu'ils emigrent en automne' (vol. i. 
p. 383), but having a greater proportion of red, especially on the 
tail-coverts, than is specified in his description of the bird at that 
age. This individual proved on dissection to be a female, and did 
not contain any eggs so large as ordinary-sized peas. The stomach, 
