The Ribald Cuckoo "
I see that the most fantastic of the theories about the cuckoo is enjoying a new vogue. The theory is described in a sentence by Mr. Bernard Acworth, its author and begetter, in a letter to the Scotsman, thus: " The alleged little foster mother is, in reality, the cuckoo's mistress and mother of the egg ; the alleged father is truly a cuckold ; and the cuckoo is thus that extreme rarity—a natural hybrid." One would have thought that such a study of the bird as Mr. Chance describes in his The Cuckoo's Secret and the film showing the deposition of the egg in a meadow pipit's nest would have been evidence enough of the truth of a more orthodox theory. However, now and then, it is claimed, the egg is found in a nest into which the cuckoo could not have penetrated, even with its beak, much less with its body. Personally I have never heard of such an impenetrable nest, and there certainly are such things as female cuckoos (though confessedly they are in a minority), and one cuckoo is singularly like another cuckoo and without any resemblance to its poor foster-mother.
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