THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 5 
see one in the head of a gully quite close to the houses of the 
suburb, and I subsequently saw it feeding a young one just 
able to fly. Quite close by I found the deserted nest, placed 
on the broken trunk of a ‘‘water gum’’ (77zstania) in the 
bed of the creek. 
As it is the generally recognised theory that young 
birds acquire their characteristic notes by imitation of their 
parents, I have sometimes wondered how our various cuckoos, 
which are reared by all sorts of host species, acquire their 
cuckoo notes—unless they are taken possession of by their 
true parents before they have passed the assimilative stage. 
Towards the end of November I was attracted by the note 
of a blue wren to some bushes at the back of my house, and 
to my surprise found that the blue wren’s song was issuing 
from the throat of a young narrow- -billed bronze-cuckoo. I 
watched the bird for some time, and the imitation was exact, 
the trilling sound of the wren’s note being obtained by a 
tremulous motion of the cuckoo’s mandibles. The bird was 
about my house for some days, in charge of a pair of wrens, 
and kept up its wren imitation the whole time. This is the 
only occasion on which I have known a young cuckoo in 
charge of its foster-parents utter anything more than a single 
baby call. 
The gentlemen who prattle so glibly about the school in 
wild life would have some hard nuts to crack if they really 
studied the development of some of our birds. A couple of 
months ago I took a young laughing jackass from the nest 
(a gloomy cavern in a white-ants’ nest, whence he would 
have no chance of watching his parents’ actions), and brought 
him home for photographic purposes. At the time of taking 
its feathers had not developed from their sheaths. It took 
readily to a meat diet, and grew rapidly, and one day when 
I had it from its cage to feed, it flew quite steadily to the 
edge of a tub some three yards away, although it had never 
stretched its wings before. A few days later it flew a much 
longer distance on to the roof of a shed. So it is obvious 
that the bird required no tuition from its parents in the art 
of flight. It also ‘‘laughed’’ without any particular voice- 
training, and, most fatal of all to the school theory, towards 
the end of its stay with me it always carefully killed its piece 
of already quite dead meat by banging it a number of times 
against its perch before eating it. This familiar action, for 
the reason I-have already pointed out, could not have been 
learnt from its parents. The bird is now at large, and look- 
ing after itself quite well, so we shall haye to fall hack on 
instinct after all, 
