"Oh, Cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice."
And indeed the Cuckoo is a flying and feathered marvel altogether; we should fill this book were we to repeat all the strange tales that have been told about it, and by grave authorities too, from Aristotle of ancient Greece, to Dr. Jenner, and the rest of modern England. Amid all the disputations that have arisen upon the points of this bird's natural history, we can only clearly gather that it is a summer migrant, coming and going at the times just mentioned; that while with us it is to be found in all wooded and sheltered parts of the island, frequenting most parks and pasture-grounds, groves and thickets, it is more likely to be seen at early morning and evening, than during the broad daylight, and its cry has been heard at all hours of the night, proving it to be somewhat nocturnal in its habits,--_nox_, you know is the Latin for night, and from thence comes this word.
The Cuckoo lives almost entirely upon insects, devouring great numbers of hairy caterpillars. It makes no nest of its own, but lays a single egg in that of some other bird, or conveys it thither in its bill. Its eggs are small for the size of the bird, in colour white, with a greyish, or it may be a reddish tinge, with cinereous (that is, ashy) or grey brown speckles. How many of these the bird lays no one can tell, but it has the judgment, or compassion, or whatever it may be, to give the Pipit, Hedge Sparrow, Wagtail, or other small bird so favoured, the task of rearing but one of its young, which soon grows to be quite a monster in the eyes of its foster parent, and sometimes, says the old Greek, Aristotle, eats her up; but this is just a physical impossibility, and a most vile slander. Whether the intruder, as Dr. Jenner says, _shovels_ up with its broad back its fellow fledglings, to whom the nest rightfully belongs, and pitches them over the edge to die miserably of cold and starvation, while he gets the whole of the food brought by the provident mother, we cannot say, but may hope, for the credit of bird nature, that this too may be a mistake, if not a fable.
The Cuckoo is an elegantly-formed and agreeably-coloured bird, the prevailing tints of its plumage being a greenish grey, fading off into white, which is barred and mottled with silky brown; the large tail is spotted and edged with white. The male resembles the female; the young at first have bars of light red and olive brown about the upper parts.