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I was fearfully puzzled one day when I heard two cuckoos both cuckooing at once." They reached Kenilworth just at sunset, when a crimson sky was flaming behind the old castle, and glowing on the windows of the picturesque cottages that faced the ancient ruin from the other side of the village green.
"And as orange as an orange," said Uncle Joe, approvingly. "I thought we could not find any more beautiful birds in your boxes, uncle," I said. "Oh! but we have not done yet, my boy; wait and see." We went on with our task, the damp peculiar odour showing that it was high time the cases were emptied. "Now, Nat, we are coming to the cuckoos," he said, as I lifted a thin layer of wool.
The Cuckoo I have been much haunted, indeed infested, if the word may be pardoned, by cuckoos lately.
This habit, unique among British birds, is practised by many others elsewhere, and in particular by the American troupials, or cattle-starlings. One of these indeed goes even farther, since it entrusts its eggs to the care of a nest-building cousin. There are also American cuckoos that build their own nest and incubate their own eggs.
Last, but not least of the common Himalayan cuckoos, are the famous brain-fever birds, whose crescendo brain-fever, BRAIN-FEVER, BRAIN-FEVER, which is shrieked at all hours of the day and the night, has called forth untold volumes of awful profanity from jaded Europeans living in the plains, and has earned the highest encomiums of Indians.
Do you call that singing?" "What bird would you prefer?" he blandly inquired. I considered for a moment. The grim possibility of ten thousand nightingales yodelling in chorus, of ten thousand skylarks, or of ten thousand cuckoos, determined my answer. "I cannot think of one," said I. "But this is no merit on your part, it is merely a qualification of evil."
"Well, then, the spruce must stay with the pirch, or the pirch live with the spruce," continued Peter. "The peech wood between the two are dangerous to both, for it's only fit for cuckoos." Peter looked chuffy and sulky. There was no minister at the remote post he had belonged to in the nor-west. The governor there read a sermon of a Sunday sometimes, but he oftener wrote letters.
She had time to remember the blue ground, dimpled and starred with sunlight, and the way the bees pulled over the bluebells and swung on them to the tune of cuckoos in a May mist; she had time to think of the green globe ghosts of the bluebells that haunted the wood after the spring was dead.
Coming as they did at the end of years of barrenness, they astonished one like the blossoming of the Rose of Sharon. But now the bough is dark and sinister and melancholy again. Sparrows squabble over their love affairs in it. The, cuckoo that stays out later than the other cuckoos is the triumphant survivor. Not that there is much to be said even for him as a model of continuance.
Cuckoos, then, reach these islands about the third week of April, and they leave us again at the end of the summer, the old birds flying south in July, the younger generation following three or four weeks later. Goodness knows by what extraordinary instinct these young ones know the way.
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