Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/162

140 the defect of natural affection in the ostrich, may be well applied to the bird we are talking of:

"She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers: "Because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath He imparted to her understanding."

Query.—Does each female cuckoo lay but one egg in a season, or does she drop several in different nests according as opportunity offers? 1

I am, etc.

1 I have found so many cuckoos' eggs in a district where there were but a limited number of cuckoos, that I am satisfied it lays several eggs. The egg of the cuckoo is small for the size of the bird, yet it often looks a monster in some of the nests in which it is deposited, such as sedge-warblers and reed-wrens. Three times at least it has been found in a grasshopper warbler's, where the foot or the beak must have been the agent in transferring the egg after being laid into the nest. One July at Wroxham Broad in Norfolk, there were thirty or forty cuckoos flying restlessly about from tree to tree, and uttering frequently a treble cry; thus: cuck-cuckoo—cuck-cuckoo. A week later they were all gone.

LETTER V., April 12th, 1770 ,—I heard many birds of several species sing last year after Midsummer; enough to prove that the summer solstice is not the period that puts a stop to the music of the woods. The yellow-hammer no doubt persists with more steadiness than any other; but the woodlark, the wren, the redbreast, the swallow, the white-throat, the goldfinch, the common linnet, are all undoubted instances of the truth of what I advanced.

If this severe season does not interrupt the regularity of the summer migrations, the black-cap will be here in two or three days.