The Oregon Mist

CUCKOO: FOLK-LORE.
Curious Ideas, Beliefs and Facts About the Strange Bird.

He must be a well read man who can exhaust the subject of cuckoo folk lore. No bird is so much noticed by rustics and round no other bird have so many curious fancies crystallized. Like the goose, several familiar plants are named from it and when it has once arrived it must eat three meals of cherries, according to the folk lore, before it ceases its song, while—

The first cock o' hay
Frights the cuckoo away
And then (after St. John's day) he turns into a hawk. Almost every game-keeper at the present day shoots cuckoos in consequence of this belief, although he could not well spare them, inasmuch as the cuckoo "sucks little birds' eggs to make her voice clear."

In Yorkshire this bird influences agriculture:

When cuckoo calls on the barest horn
Sell your cow and buy your corn.

Woe betide you if you do not turn the money in your pocket on first hearing the bird! If you have plenty of coins at that time endless good fortune will follow you throughout the year, and any wish within reasonable limits will then be granted. Here is another farmers' proverb, the interpretation of which is self evident:

Cuckoo oats and woodcock hay
Make a farmer run away.

Not only does the cuckoo prognosticate length of life, but what is still more interesting it is able to tell maidens how many years they will remain unmarried. A pretty Bohemian superstition accounts for the fact of the cuckoo building no nest, but laying her own egg in that of a linnet or hedge sparrow. On the feast of the Annunciation, it seems, old custom prescribed that birds should leave off building their nests; the cuckoo was an exception, and worked as usual. It was therefore cursed and deprived of a husband. Some may be glad to know that they can insure themselves against lumbago the rest of the year by rolling over and over in the grass the first time the cuckoo is heard. Its note is proverbially monotonous, and the Scotch have a saying, "Ye're like the cuckoo, ye hae but one song." Its depositing its egg in a strange nest and leaving it there to be hatched is the origin of Shakespeare's rather forced jokes on its name—"A word of fear, unpleasant to a husband's ear."

In the ancient system of medicine the cuckoo was a bird of much value. The body of a cuckoo, for instance, next the body in a hareskin caused sleep. These are samples of the genius for the marvelous which so dominated men's minds in the Middle ages, and which still remains in out of the way districts. The strange habits of the cuckoo tended to the formation of these myths, and nothing could be too wild or extravagant to father on so curious a bird.

And yet the facts of the cuckoo's life and economy are so curious that no inventive powers are required to heighten the bird's attractiveness. It is supposed that the males considerably outnumber the females, and that the latter do not sing. The cuckoo is a parasitical bird, leaving its eggs to be hatched and its young to be reared by foster parents. Two birds, belonging respectively to North and South America, somewhat akin to our starling (Molothrus pecoris and M. niger) possess analogous habits, and with the cuckoos are the only birds which fasten, as it were, on another bird, upon whose food they live and whose death would involve theirs during the period of infancy.

Another fact has been discovered in regard to this. It is found that the female cuckoo lays her egg, not in the nest which she selects, but on the ground—sometimes close, at other times some little distance from the nest—and then transports it in her bill to the nest where she desires to leave it. Professor Newton remarks that cuckoos have occasionally been shot while thus carrying their eggs, and thinks, with much show of reason, that this custom has probably given rise to the belief that they suck the eggs of other birds: to which we would add the corroborative fact that they are continually mobbed by other birds as if they were mischievous robbers. The egg, as most school boys know, is very variable in color.

When it is hatched the young cuckoo speedily thrusts out its foster parents' eggs, and even any young ones, shouldering them, as it were, on its back, as Jenner (who actually saw the process) describes it, and then throwing them out of the nest with a jerk. Most residents in the country must have noticed the ungainly looking young cuckoo after it has flown from the nest, resting on the lawn or on a tree in a helpless, begging attitude, noisily calling for food, which is always faithfully supplied by its foster mother, even when herself but a little water wagtail. This contrast between the pair in size and independence is ludicrous and striking. After some time the young cuckoo follows its kind to the south, the old ones always going first.—Cor. St. James Budget.