An individual Cuckoo probably always lays its eggs in the same neighbourhood, and always in the nest of the same kind of bird, and usually the same kind in which it was itself brought up. The young Cuckoo soon obtains the upper hand in the nest, on account of its rapid growth, and throws out its weaker foster-brothers and sisters. It always calls its own name—though it sounds more like “ha-hu”; sometimes it utters sounds which are like laughter. There is a popular superstition that the Cuckoo foretells to those who ask it, how many years they will live—and to young maidens, how many years they must wait for a husband.
Like the Swallow it brings the announcement of spring, and our Hungarian children have a song:—
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo! sounds from the wood
Now let us dance and sing;
For Spring is coming; Spring is here;”
The Cuckoo detracts from its usefulness, however, by its other actions. It greatly damages the nests of the small useful birds, in which it places its eggs, and consequently its young ones. The female Cuckoo selects a district, finds out all the nests of Wren, Robin, White-throat, Wagtail, or some other, and thereupon begins to place her egg in this. When she finds that she cannot get into a nest of a bird which builds in a hole, she lays her egg on the ground, then takes it up in her bill and drops it into the nest.
In spring and summer the Cuckoo’s note sounds all through Great Britain. Its ways will always have a fascination both for the old and the young. Many will be surprised to hear that scientists have now verified the placing of its eggs in the nests of as many as 145 species; in different countries, that is, including the nests of the Isabelline and other Chats in Africa and China, and the Red-headed Bunting on the steppes of Turkestan. In Lapland the Grey-headed Wagtail and the Red-spotted Bluethroat are the foster-parents; in Andalusia the Great-spotted Cuckoo lays oftenest in the nest of the Spanish Magpie.[2] The old poet, Quarles, must have seen the bird with an egg in its beak when he wrote “The idle Cuckoo having made a feast of Sparrow’s eggs, Lays down her own i’ the nest.”
A German authority, Dr. Rey, made a collection of over seven hundred Cuckoo’s eggs; and he states that the proportion of those which resemble in colouring those of the foster-parents is only about thirty per cent. Yet out of sixty-seven which he took from a Redstart’s nest fifty-seven were blue. Another collector again states that only one blue Cuckoo’s egg had passed through his hands. Lately a man told me of having found two Cuckoo’s eggs in one small nest, an unusual occurrence.
The Cuckoo is a very slender, long-tailed bird, 12 inches in length. In the male bird the mantle is ashen-grey, the tail has cross stripes, the under-parts are whitish with cross-running wavy lines. The female and young ones, with their reddish-brown dark cross bands, remind us of the Hawk. From this arises the popular superstition that the Cuckoo changes into a hawk in late autumn. The legs are yellow; eyes fiery red edged with yellow, beak dark, reddish at the corners. It never builds a nest. In its system of transplanting it shows itself an arrant knave, for it places its eggs in the nests of other birds, whose eggs, as a rule are totally different in size, colour and form. The eggs of one Cuckoo so placed may reach the number of 20 to 22, but as a rule are about 11 to 12.
With regard to the Cuckoo’s usual habit of leaving us in the autumn, a belated young bird may now and again spend the winter here. One frequented my sister’s tennis ground till the end of November, when the cat caught and killed it; and a gentleman of my acquaintance, Mr. Robinson of Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire, saw one on his farm early in February of 1908.
USEFUL.