There Is No
Night-Feeding Bird To Feed The Fern Owl's Young.
Does any one think the
cuckoo could herself feed two young cuckoos?
How many birds would it take
to feed three young cuckoos? Supposing there were - five - young cuckoos in
the nest, would it not take almost all the birds in a hedge to feed them?
For the incredible voracity of the young cuckoo - swallow, swallow,
swallow, and gape, gape, gape - cannot be computed. The two robins or the
pair of hedge-sparrows in whose nest the young cuckoo is bred, work the
day through, and cannot satisfy him; and the mother cuckoo is said to
come and assist in feeding him at times. How, then, could the cuckoo feed
two or three of its offspring and itself at the same time? Several other
birds do not build nests - the plover, the fern owl. That is no evidence
of lack of intelligence. The cuckoo's difficulty, or one of its
difficulties, seems to be in the providing sufficient food for its
ravenous young. A half-fledged cuckoo is already a large bird, and needs
a bulk of soft food for its support. Three of them would wear out their
mother completely, especially if - as may possibly be the case - the male
cuckoo will not help in feeding. This is the simplest explanation, I
think; yet, as I have often said before, we must not always judge the
ways of birds or animals or insects either by strict utility, or by
crediting them with semi-supernatural intelligence. They have their
fancies, likes and dislikes, and caprices. There are circumstances - perhaps
far back in the life-history of their race - of which we know nothing, but
which may influence their conduct unconsciously still, just as the
crusades have transmitted a mark to our minds to-day. Even though an
explanation may satisfy us, it is by no means certain that it is the true
one, for they may look at matters in an entirely different manner from
what we do. The effect of the cuckoo's course is to cause an immense
destruction of insects, and it is really one of the most valuable as well
as the most welcome of all our birds.
The thin pipe of the gnat heard at night is often alluded to, half in
jest, by our older novelists. It is now, I think, dying out a good deal,
and local where it stays. It occurred to me, on seeing some such allusion
the other day, that it was six years since I had heard a gnat in a
bedroom - never since we left a neighbourhood where there had once been
marshy ground. Gnats are, however, less common generally - exclusive, of
course, of those places where there is much water. All things are local,
insects particularly so. On clay soils the flies in summer are most
trying; black flies swarm on the eyes and lips, and in the deep lanes
cannot be kept off without a green bough.
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