A Rare Victim Cuckoos are, I think, more than usually
numerous, certainly in the Lakes where once Wordsworth, listening to them, could "beget that golden time again." Thereabout I saw daily a company of three disagreeing together. Their numbers have perhaps influenced their taste in victims. At any rate one observer has been interested and surprised by the sight on his lawn of a thrush eagerly feeding a young cuckoo. Now, though cuckoos have their favourite victims (meadow pipits, wagtails and hedge-sparrows above others), their taste is catholic and the complete list of foster parents a long one ; but, so far as I know, the thrush is one of the rarer choices, rarer even than the blackbird. It is of course possible that this thrush was not the foster mother, since the orange gape of the young cuckoo may attract even a passer-by. What a strange deviation of the parental instinct, inspiring a being to devote itself to the murderer of its true children
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