With this object in mind, they quite as often choose a hollow surface of rock in some waste pasture or the open ground on which to deposit the two speckled-gray eggs that sixteen days later will give birth to their family. But in August, when family cares have ended for the season, it is curious to find this bird of the thickly wooded country readily adapting itself to city life, resting on Mansard roofs, darting into the streets from the house-tops, and wheeling about the electric lights, making a hearty supper of the little, winged insects they attract.
Black-billed Cuckoo
(Coccyzus erythrophthalmus) Cuckoo family
Called also: RAIN CROW
Length—11 to 12 inches. About one-fifth larger than the robin.
Male—Grayish brown above, with bronze tint in feathers. Underneath grayish white; bill, which is long as head and black, arched and acute. Skin about the eye bright red. Tail long, and with spots on tips of quills that are small and inconspicuous.
Female—Has obscure dusky bars on the tail.
Range—Labrador to Panama; westward to Rocky Mountains.
Migrations—May. September. Summer resident.
"O cuckoo! shall I call thee bird?
Or but a wandering voice?"
From the tangled shrubbery on the hillside back of Dove Cottage, Keswick, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy listened for the coming of this "darling of the spring"; in the willows overhanging Shakespeare's Avon; from the favorite haunts of Chaucer and Spenser, where