s given rise to the popular belief
that the bird must resort to exceptional means in these instances. Sir
William Jardine, for instance, in an editorial foot-note in one of
Gilbert White's pages, remarks:

"It is a curious fact, and one, I believe, not hitherto noticed by
naturalists, that the cuckoo deposits its egg in the nests of the
titlark, robin, and wagtail by means of its foot. If the bird sat on the
nest while the egg was laid, the weight of its body would crush the nest
and cause it to be forsaken, and thus one of the ends of Providence
would be defeated. I have found the eggs of the cuckoo in the nest of a
white-throat, built in so small a hole in a garden wall that it was
absolutely impossible for the cuckoo to have got into it."

In the absence of substantiation, this, at best, presumptive evidence is
discounted by the well-attested fact that the cuckoo has frequently been
shot in the act of carrying a cuckoo's egg in its mouth, and there is on
record an authentic account of a cuckoo which was observed through a
telescope to lay her egg on a bank, and then take it in her _bill_ and
deposit it in the nest of a wagtail.

There is no evidence to warrant a similar resource in our cow-bird,
though the inference would often appear irresistible, did we not know
that Wilson actually saw the cow-bird in the act of laying in the
diminutive nest of a red-eyed vireo, and also in that of the bluebird.

And what is the almost certain doom of the bird-home thus contaminated
by the cow-bird?

[Illustration]

The egg is always laid betimes, and is usually the first to hatch, the
period of incubation being a day or two less than that of the eggs of
the foster-parent. And woe be to the fledglings whom fate has associated
with a young cow-bird! He is the "early bird that gets the worm." His is
the clamoring red mouth which takes the provender of the entire family.
It is all "grist into his mill," and everything he eats seems to go to
appetite--his bedfellows, if not thus starved to death, being at length
crushed by his comparatively ponderous bulk, or ejected from the nest
to die. It is a pretty well established fact that the cuckoo of Europe
deliberately ousts its companion fledglings--a fact first noted by the
famous Dr. Jenner. And Darwin has even asserted that the process of
anatomical evolution has especially equipped the young cuckoo for such
an accomplishment--a practice in which some accommodating philosophic
mi