COUNTRY LIFE
A Parental Cuckoo That immoral bird, the cuckoo, is very freakish in habit. I gave the other day an account of its incontinent meal of four wagtails' eggs. A stranger tale is told me by a friend who lives in Yorkshire. There was discovered in the garden a thrush's nest containing two young cuckoos and one thrush's egg. The thrush is not often victimised and it is, of course, rare, though not unknown, for two cuckoos' eggs (probably belonging to different mothers) to be laid in one nest, but these oddities do not compose the whole novelty of the situation. A cuckoo—not a thrush—was observed to be engaged in the wholly alien act of feeding its own young. I have seen a good many collections of cuckoos' eggs with the clutches they were among and have seen the list of species of bird that they have been known to victimise. It is a long one and includes both blackbird and thrush. But I do not know that I ever heard of a cuckoo playing the sedulous parent. The young cuckoo has so well established a reputation for ejecting its neighbours in the nursery that it would be interesting to know whether one young cuckoo tries to throw out another young cuckoo—" then comes the tug of war." The whole story of these two cuckoos should be put on the records.
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