100 THE LIVING ANIMALS OF THE WORLD 
confirmed by most trustworthy observers, we must now admit the charge proved. One of 
the best known of these accounts is that of Mrs. Hugh Blackburn. She has given us a vivid 
picture of this most extraordinary of domestic tragedies. The victims in this instance were 
meadow-pipits. Finding a pipit’s nest with a cuckoo’s egg therein, she kept it carefully 
under observation. At one visit she found the pipits hatched, but not the cuckoo. Forty- 
eight hours later the cuckoo had not only arrived, but ousted his foster-brothers and -sisters, 
who were found lying outside the nest, but yet alive. They were replaced beside the cuckoo, 
which at once reopened hostilities for the purpose of maintaining its absolute possession of 
the nursery. This it did by burrowing under one of them, which, balanced upon its back, 
it proceeded to eject by climbing up the nest tail-foremost, till, reaching the brim, it could 
relieve itself of its burden by heaving it over the edge and down the bank. Pausing a 
moment, it then felt backwards with its wings to make sure the pipit was really gone, and, 
having satisfied itself on this point, subsided to the bottom of the nest. Next day, when 
the nest was visited, the remaining pipit was found outside the nest cold and dead. “ But 
what struck me most,” she writes, “ was this : the cuckoo was perfectly naked, without a 
vestige of a feather or even a hint of feathers, its eyes were not yet opened, and its neck 
seemed too weak to support the weight of its head. The pipits had well-developed quills on 
the wings and back, and had bright eyes partially opened, yet they seemed quite helpless 
under the manipulations of the cuckoo, which looked a much less developed creature.” 
The Great Spotted Cuckoo of South Europe and North Africa is a species which, though 
parasitic, does not seem to have sunk to such a depth as the common cuckoo. Its eggs 
very closely resemble those of certain 
magpies and crows within its breeding- 
area, and it is in the nests of these that 
they are deposited. We may assume 
that mimicry has been resorted to, and 
become perfected by the same means as 
have accomplished this end in the case 
of the common cuckoo. We notice here, 
however, two points of difference there- 
from. In the first place, from two to 
four eggs are left in each nest instead 
of one ; and, secondly, the young cuckoos 
seem to live in perfect amity with their 
foster-brothers and -sisters — there is no 
ejection of the rightful heirs. 
Having pledged themselves to a 
course of deception and treachery, there 
is no telling the lengths to which such 
conduct may lead. We have already 
seen that the bird has succeeded in lay- 
ing what we may call forged eggs, but 
we come now to an instance where the 
young has also to be disguised. This 
is furnished by a species of cuckoo 
known as the KOEL, inhabiting Palawan, 
an island in the Philippines. This bird 
shifts its parental duties upon the 
shoulders of a species of myna inhabit- 
ing the same island. Now, the mynas 
are black, and their young, as is often 
the case where both sexes are coloured 
CUCKOO ONE DAY OLD IN HEDGE-SPARROW’S 
NEST 
The young bird has its mouth open, ready for all the food the foster-parents 
can collect 
