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Updated: June 12, 2025
Then she took him up, parted her lips to let him peck her teeth once more, held him against her breast for a long, bitterly sad moment, and mounting, rode away. When she was only a rod or so from him, the cowbird tried to follow. But his maimed wings would not obey, and he fell back to the ground again and again.
The observer was Joseph F. Honecker, whose statement was printed in "American Ornithology" for June, 1902, and runs as follows: "As ornithologists and all bird students think and believe that the cowbird will build no nest, but always lays in the nests of other birds, I am glad to give the results of my experiments.
When, after waiting some time in vain for the birds to appear, we examined the nest before us, we found that it held two thrush eggs and one of the cowbird. The impertinence of this disreputable bird in thrusting her plebeian offspring upon the divine songster, to rear at the expense of her own lovely brood, was not to be tolerated.
The little girl knew that the carrot-eating was useless, since the spot was only the mark of an unsuccessful attempt at tattooing; but she did not care to explain. Then, the cowbird had been sent away; and, as a last blow, she had been told to go to school. There was no doubt in her mind that her misfortunes were due wholly to the fact that she had precisely thirteen freckles on her pink nose.
I am so!" "But what's it all about?" demanded Peter impatiently. "Do keep still long enough to tell me. Who is this contemptible creature?" "Sally Sly," snapped Jenny Wren. "Sally Sly the Cowbird. I hoped she wouldn't disgrace the Old Orchard this year, but she has. When Mr. and Mrs. Chebec returned from getting their breakfast this morning they found one of Sally Sly's eggs in their nest.
Her face was whiter than it had been that morning, and she had no happy chatter with which to answer him as he chirruped to her gaily and leaned forward from time to time to peck at her teeth. Her ears were still ringing with her big brothers' laughter, and with the pitiless command that had driven the cowbird forth to the prairies again a wing-clipped tramp and an outcast!
"The Redeyes are working themselves to feathers and bone feeding that ugly young Cowbird while their own babies aren't getting half enough to eat," continued Jenny. "One of them has died already. He was kicked out of the nest by that young brute." "How dreadful!" cried Peter. "If he does things like that I should think the Redeyes would throw HIM out of the nest."
If parasitism were the only crime of the cowbird one would not feel so much disposed to put her into the Newgate Calendar; but she not only inflicts her own eggs upon her innocent victims, but often actually tosses their eggs out of the nests in order to make room for her own.
A single male red-wing, as we have seen, may assume the cares of a harem of three, four, or five females, each of which rears her brown-streaked offspring in her own particular nest, while the valiant guardian keeps faithful watch over his small colony among the reeds and cat-tails. But little thought or care does mother cowbird waste upon her offspring.
A few days afterward I looked again, and the nest was completed. The bird had got ahead of the wind at last. The nesting-instinct had triumphed over the weather. Take the case of the little yellow warbler when the cowbird drops her egg into its nest does anything like a process of thought or reflection pass in the bird's mind then?
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