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Just before he reached it a brown bird, who reminded him somewhat of Mrs. Redwing and Sally Sly the Cowbird, though she was smaller, ran across the path in front of him and then flew up to the top of a last year's mullein stalk. It was Mrs. Bobolink. Peter knew her well, for he and she were very good friends. "Oh!" cried Peter. "What are you doing here?
This, I am disposed to believe, is one of the compensating uses of this parasite, and may furnish the reason for his being tolerated in birdland. And he is tolerated. Has any one ever seen other birds driving the cowbird away from their breeding precincts, or charging him with desperate courage, as they do the blue jays, the hawks, the owls, and other predatory species?
And Uncle Wiggily called after her that she ought to be ashamed of herself not to build her own nests. And I guess that cowbird was ashamed, but I'm not sure. Anyhow she came back a little later and gathered up her eggs off the ground, and flew away with them, and what she did with them I'll tell you; oh, just as soon as you like.
It suggested the thought that perhaps, when the cowbird finds the full complement of eggs in a nest, it throws out one and deposits its own instead. I revisited the nest a few days afterward and found an egg again cast out, but none had been put in its place. The nest had been abandoned by its owner and the eggs were stale.
This little fellow was absorbed in the care of an infant more than twice as big as himself. "A cowbird baby!" will exclaim every one who knows the habit, shameful from our point of view, of the cowbird, to impose her infants on her neighbors to hatch and bring up. But this baby, unfortunately for the "wisdom of the wise," did not resemble the cowbird family.
The male cowbird looks like a well-dressed gentleman and may have even a slightly clerical air in his closely fitting suit of glossy black, with its greenish and purplish iridescence, and his hood of rich metallic brown covering his head, neck, and chest.
"Look-see! look-see!" he mourned, closing his eyes and lifting one stiff leg from his perch. "Look-see! look-see!" A moment later, hearing the sound of loud laughter in the kitchen, the little girl got out of bed and ran to find out what was the matter. But when she caught sight of the cowbird on the shelf before the row of big brothers, she did not join in the merriment.
This all looks very like reflection. But let us consider the matter a moment. This thing between the cowbird and the warbler has been going on for innumerable generations. The yellow warbler seems to be the favorite host of this parasite, and something like a special instinct may have grown up in the warbler with reference to this strange egg.
"I don't see what makes them act so," said Rap. "I thought birds had to build nests, or have a hole or a bit of ground or rock of their own that it was a law." "So it is, my boy; but the Cowbird is one of the exceptions I told you about; and I am glad to say there are very few." The Cowbird Length about seven and a half inches.
THE young cowbird, perched tail to windward on a stone beside the road, raised his head, and uttered a hoarse cry of hunger and lonesomeness as a great black flock of his own kind, sweeping by on its way to the grazing herd in the gully, shadowed the ground about him for an instant. "Look-see! look-see!" he called plaintively, rolling his eyes and ruffling his throat; "look-see! look-see!"
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