“I was born in this wood in a hedge-sparrow’s nest three years ago,” said the Cuckoo, on another morning when he sat on a bough above the Vixen’s earth, “and when I am a father the egg is always blue. The mother of the egg you have just seen visited me for a few days at the end of May and laid this egg for me on the ground. You see I had no nest to offer her. So soon as we saw that the colour was blue, as I expected it to be, we scoured the wood for a nest that had eggs similar to it. We soon found the hedge-sparrow’s. Then we waited patiently for both birds to go for an airing, and my mate took the egg up in her mouth and flew with it to the nest. There she left it, and on the following day I said good-bye to her and she went away.”
“Will she lay any more eggs this year?” the Vixen asked him.
“It is quite possible,” replied the Cuckoo, “at intervals of a week or ten days, but they will be no concern of mine, in fact, they may not even be blue. But they will all find a place in the nests of birds that have our tastes in food. In parts where there are no insect-eating birds you would have to search a long time to find a cuckoo.”
“Do the hedge-sparrows, and warblers, and pipits and the rest of them realise the trick you have played upon them?” she asked him. “My mother once chose a badger’s earth for her home and I was the only one that got out alive.”
“Never,” he replied lightly. “They only think one of their eggs is a little unlike the rest, that’s all. You know our eggs are quite small for our size. And when they are all hatched the parents must work harder than they expected to, for a young cuckoo can eat as much as the rest of the family put together.”
Some fourteen or fifteen days after the strange egg had been put in it, a blind ugly cuckoo came from the shell in the hedge-sparrow’s nest, calling for food. The little hedge-sparrows had not yet appeared, but the unoccupied parent bird had all his work cut out to keep the newcomer satisfied. He was constantly on the wing through the wood in search of insects, and very often strayed to the orchard of Home Farm, where fat green caterpillars, most luscious morsels, were to be found among the currant bushes. And all that time the Father Cuckoo was living at ease on the fat of the land.
“I met that hard-working hedge-sparrow this morning,” he said to the Vixen, when he took his favourite place on the branch of an elder above her earth; “he was coming to the orchard as I left it. What a splendid arrangement it is to be sure. I’m sure my baby will be well fed, and that foster-father seems to enjoy the work. Let him thank his good luck there are not two of my family in his nest. If there were, he would have no time to feed himself or his mate.”
“Do the hens ever put two eggs into one nest?” said the Vixen.
“Only by accident,” he replied. “Sometimes it happens that a hen carries an egg to a nest, and deposits it there without noticing that some other hen has been before her. She would not carry two of her own eggs to the same nest. Hers is too keen a sense of affection for the unborn; she knows as well as I do that there is quite enough work for any pair of small birds in the raising of a single cuckoo.”
The little hedge-sparrows were born only to die. Their ungainly foster-brother was clamorous for all the food that reached the nest, and he could not stretch himself without danger to the little ones. Do not let it be said that he deliberately murdered them; but before they were three days old all lay dead on the ground below the hedge. The parent birds did not seem to feel their loss very keenly. Probably this was their second brood, and the earlier one had been reared successfully; for the nest, built of wool and horsehair and soft mosses, is always one of the first to appear in the Heron Wood, and, being badly hidden, is preyed upon by all unscrupulous egg-eating birds, or egg-collecting boys.