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glad Mr. Davenport has raised the question of Cuckoos sucking eggs, which, with so many good observers, ought to be definitely settled. To describe them as habitually sucking eggs by choice, as is occasionally done in popular books, is a little misleading, for their primary intent, it must certainly be conceded, is to remove, not to eat them. The Cuckoo's throat is very wide; and if in the operation of moving eggs from some Wagtail's nest an egg slips down, we have what in court would be called presumptive evidence that they by no means object to it. But to charge a Cuckoo with sucking the eggs of Pheasants and Wood Pigeons, and even Grouse (as in the case of the gamekeeper cited by Mr. Storrs Fox), seems absurd. There is nothing to induce a Cuckoo to enter the nests of these birds, and even if they did their shells would be very tough for its feeble bill; while probably Cuckoos would not peck or impale an egg at any time, but rather try to crush it between the two mandibles. I once saw in an open meadow a Cuckoo rise from near a Skylark's nest, from which it had no doubt retreated a few feet on hearing my approach; I immediately went up, and found a broken Lark's egg in the nest. This was evidently the work of the Cuckoo, which may even have been sucking the egg when I came up. There were no other egg-shells in the grass; and if that Cuckoo could have been promptly shot, I should have expected to find the remains of other Lark's eggs in its œsophagus. A gentleman wrote in 'The Field,' under the initials of W.R.G. (I have unfortunately not kept the exact reference), that while he was sitting with a friend in Dorsetshire, in a room looking out upon an ivyclad wall, a Cuckoo passed the window. Knowing that a Pied Wagtail had her nest on the wall, the two observers approached the window, and watched the Cuckoo clinging to the ivy barely four yards away from them. They distinctly saw her