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Updated: June 12, 2025
Her young may be hatched and carefully reared by the patient little warbler mother, or the egg may spoil in the deserted nest, or be left in the cold beneath another nest bottom built over it; little cares the cowbird. The ospreys or fish hawks seem to circle southward in pairs or trios, but some clear, cold day the sky will be alive with hawks of other kinds.
Thus it appears that the intrusion of the cowbird's eggs does not always mean disaster to the real offspring of the brooding family, but of course it often prevents the laying of the full complement of eggs by the builders themselves. Even after the youngsters have left the nest the mother cowbird does not assume the care of them, but still leaves them in charge of the foster parents.
But when our yellow warbler, finding this strange egg of the cowbird in her nest, proceeds to bury it by putting another bottom in the nest and carrying up the sides to correspond, she shows something very much like sense and judgment, though of a clumsy kind. How much simpler and easier it would be to throw out the strange egg!
And when she saw what had been done, and how her eggs had been tossed out of the robin's nest where they didn't belong, that cowbird flew at the pussy and was going to pick her eyes out. But Uncle Wiggily took his crutch, and tickled the cowbird so that she sneezed, and had to fly away without doing any harm.
She had learned that about the pugholes flutter choirs of crimson-winged blackbirds; that the ugly brown birds squatting on fence-rails were the divine-voiced meadow larks; that among the humble cowbird citizens of the pastures sometimes flaunted a scarlet tanager or an oriole; and that no rose garden has the quaint and hardy beauty of the Indian paint brushes and rag babies and orange milkweed in the prickly, burnt-over grass between roadside and railway line.
"Now, that will be the last of those bad birds," said the pussy as she started to climb down to where Uncle Wiggily was waiting for her. "Yes, indeed, and thank you very much," spoke the robin. "Now, my little ones will have a chance to grow and live." And just then there was a fluttering and a rustling in the bushes, and the bad cowbird came flying past.
As she turned, very puzzled, from the shelf to the table, she saw the cowbird gravely walking about on the white oil-cloth. "Look-see! look-see!" he cried to her, flirting his tail and blinking his eyes. "Look-see! look-see!" She ran to the table and seized him angrily in her hands, certain that he had forsaken his own little pan of water to bathe in the milk.
You've been stealing eggs from every nest in the woods!" "Tut! Tut!" said Major Monkey. "When a lazy Cowbird lays an egg in somebody else's nest, the owner ought to be grateful to me for taking the egg out and eating it." "It's not that," Jasper Jay replied. "The trouble is, you've taken all kinds of eggs." "Well, well!" said Major Monkey. "To be sure, I may have made a mistake now and then.
"What happens when the Cowbird's egg stays in the nest and hatches out? Aren't the other little birds squeezed and uncomfortable?" asked Dodo. "Yes, they are very uncomfortable indeed, and often starve to death; but you must wait to hear about that until we come to the Cowbird himself." "What family does he train with?" asked Nat. "With the Blackbirds and Orioles," said the Doctor.
And one fat cowbird remarked with a smirk that it was too bad they hadn't brought the children along to help. The others grinned; for the cowbird youngsters were all being cared for by other birds who had big enough families of their own without looking after outsiders. But they didn't know that the Muley Cow had heard any stories about that.
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