Hawk and Cuckoo
I have been severely taken to task by purists for ratting a kestrel a sparrow-hawk. I am guilty, but unrepentant. I was, unfortunately, brought up to call a kestrel a sparrow-hawk, just as I was taught that hawks and cuckoos were one and the same thing, for the simple reason that you never saw them together and at the same time of the year. Suckled on such country ignorance, I also called a rook a crow. I never spoke of anything but scaring crows, of crow's-nests in ships, of scare-crows in fields, &c., though I talked of rook-pie and rook-shooting and rookeries and being rooked ; crow and rook being always, for country people, one and the same thing. In the same way I called a heron a heronshaw, a chaffinch a pink and a yellow-hammer a writing lark. Though this is not the same thing as confusing kestrel and sparrow-hawk, it shows how such a mistake can be almost constitutional. The superstition that cuckoo and hawk are the same bird is, by the way, an old one. Birds of the same colouring, size and general appearance were naturally bound to be confused. And last summer, as though it were true, I saw a dozen finches chasing with fury a solitary cuckoo, as if glad of the chance of finding a hawk by any other name.
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