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Updated: June 12, 2025
W. H. Hudson, who, in collaboration with Mr. P. L. Sclater, has published a most valuable work on Argentine ornithology. It is a blue-blooded parasite, and has been seen striking its beak into the eggs of other birds and flying away with them. The males, it is said, show little discrimination in pecking the eggs, for they are just as likely to puncture the cowbird eggs as those of other birds.
One evening I told him and our eldest brother that I had seen a strange thing in a bird which had led me to find out something new. Our commonest species was the parasitic cowbird, which laid its eggs anywhere in the nests of all the other small birds.
We've journeyed so far that we don't want to go a bit farther if we can help it. Have you seen Sally Sly the Cowbird around here this spring?" Peter nodded. "Yes," said he, "I have." "I'm sorry to hear it," declared Sunshine. "She made us a lot of trouble last year. But we fooled her." "How did you fool her?" asked Peter. Sunshine paused to pick a tiny worm from a leaf.
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.
It would not be easy to exaggerate, for instance, the flashings and evolutions of the redstart when it arrives in May, or the acting and posing of the catbird, or the gesticulations of the yellow breasted chat, or the nervous and emphatic character of the large-billed water thrush, or the many pretty attitudes of the great Carolina wren; but to give the same dramatic character to the demure little song sparrow, or to the slow moving cuckoo, or to the pedestrian cowbird, or to the quiet Kentucky warbler, as Audubon has done, is to convey a wrong impression of these birds.
The hen cannot keep out of the water the ducks she has hatched, nor can the duck coax into the water the chickens she has hatched. The cowbird hatched and reared by the sparrow, or the warbler, or the vireo does not sing the song of the foster-parent. Why? Did its parent not try to teach it?
He was my guide and philosopher, and had also been a better friend ever since our fight with knives and the cowbird episode; nevertheless he still managed to dissemble his love, and when I revolted against his tyranny I generally got well punished for it.
The day's work begins. One late young redhead in a hole high up in the decaying trunk of an aspen tree calls loudly for his breakfast, redoubling his noise as his mother approaches with the first course. Sitting clumsily on a big stump, a big baby cowbird, well able to shift for himself, shamelessly takes food from his little field sparrow foster-mother, scarcely more than half his size.
This will show that the cowbird will build a nest and care for its young in captivity, while in its wild life it has never been known to do so." *Reprinted by permission from "The Evening Post," New York. In his coat of light blue, trimmed with white and black, bearing his crest jauntily atop of his head, the blue jay presents an attractive picture.
Overwhelmed with sorrow, the little girl turned back to where the cattle-gad lay, holding her apron up to her wet eyes as she stumbled miserably along. But just as she flung herself down beside the whip, there came a harsh call from behind her, where the lunch-pail stood. It was the cowbird. "Look-see! look-see!" he cried, pecking at the brown paper that held the gingerbread.
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