My Studio Neighbors | Page 8

down the bank, about ten inches from the margin of
the nest, but quite lively after being warmed in the hand. They were
replaced in the nest beside the cuckoo, which struggled about till it got
its back under one of them, when it climbed backward directly up the
open side of the nest and pitched the pipit from its back on to the edge.
It then stood quite upright on its legs, which were straddled wide apart,
with the claws firmly fixed half-way down the inside of the nest, and,
stretching its wings apart and backward, it elbowed the pipit fairly over
the margin so far that its struggles took it down the bank instead of
back into the nest. After this the cuckoo stood a minute or two feeling
back with its wings, as if to make sure that the pipit was fairly
overboard, and then subsided into the bottom of the nest.
"I replaced the ejected one and went home. On returning the next day,
both nestlings were found dead and cold out of the nest.... But what
struck me most was this: the cuckoo was perfectly naked, without a
vestige of a feather, or even a hint of future feathers; its eyes were not
yet opened, and its neck seemed too weak to support the weight of the
head. The pipit had well-developed quills on the wings and back, and
had bright eyes, partially open, yet they seemed quite helpless under
the manipulations of the cuckoo, which looked a much less developed
creature. The cuckoo's legs, however, seemed very muscular; and it
appeared to feel about with its wings, which were absolutely featherless,

as with hands, the spurious wing (unusually large in proportion)
looking like a spread-out thumb."
Considering how rarely we see the cow-bird in our walks, her merciless
ubiquity is astonishing. It occasionally happens that almost every nest I
meet in a day's walk will show the ominous speckled egg. In a single
stroll in the country I have removed eight of these foreboding tokens of
misery. Only last summer I discovered the nest of a wood-sparrow in a
hazel-bush, my attention being attracted thither by the parent bird
bearing food in her beak. I found the nest occupied, appropriated,
monopolized, by a cow-bird fledgling--a great, fat, clamoring lubber,
completely filling the cavity of the nest, the one diminutive, puny
remnant of the sparrow's offspring being jammed against the side of the
nest, and a skeleton of a previous victim hanging among the branches
below, with doubtless others lost in the grass somewhere in the near
neighborhood, where they had been removed by the bereaved mother.
The ravenous young parasite, though not half grown, was yet bigger by
nearly double than the foster-mother. What a monster this! The "Black
Douglass" of the bird home; a blot on Nature's page!
As in previous instances, observing that the interloper had a voice fully
capable of making his wants known, I gave the comfortable little beast
ample room to spread himself on the ground, and let the lone little
starveling survivor of the rightful brood have his cot all to himself.
And yet, as I left the spot, I confess to a certain misgiving, as the
pleading chirrup of the ousted fledgling followed me faintly and more
faintly up the hill, recalling, too, the many previous similar acts of
mine--and one in particular, when I had slaughtered in cold blood two
of these irresponsibles found in a single nest. But sober second thought
evoked a more philosophic and conscientious mood, the outcome of
which leading, as always, to a semi-conviction that the complex
question of reconciliation of duty and humanity in the premises was not
thus easily disposed of, considering, as I was bound to do, the equal
innocence of the chicks, both of which had been placed in the nest in
obedience to a natural law, which in the case of the cow-bird was none
the less a divine institution because I failed to understand it. Such is the

inevitable, somewhat penitent conclusion which I always arrive at on
the cow-bird question; and yet my next cow-bird fledgling will
doubtless follow the fate of all its predecessors, the reminiscent qualms
of conscience finding a ready philosophy equal to the emergency; for if,
indeed, this parasite of the bird home be a factor in the divine plan of
Nature's equilibrium, looking towards the survival of the fittest and the
regulation of the sparrow and small-bird population, which we must
admit, how am I to know but that this righteous impulse of the human
animal is not equally a divine, as it is certainly a natural institution
looking to the limitations of the cow-bird? One June morning, a year or
two ago, I heard a loud squeaking, as of a