Attack on the Cuckoo
Hudson, in perhaps the most famous passage ever written about the cuckoo, calls attention to the remarkable indifference of a robin to her own ejected nestling—" slowly and dumbly dying . . . no more than a coloured leaf, or a bird-shaped pebble, or fragment of clay." This example of parental blindness to the sufferings of its own young in favour of the young cuckoo has led to a belief, I think, that birds are also indifferent to the menace of the cuckoo parent. Yet 'quite a common sight in the spring countryside is the pursuit, and often the persecution, of the cuckoo by birds which are its potential victims. Sometimes a cuckoo is pursued by a single bird ; sometimes the attack is communal—several birds of a different species chasing- a single retreating cuckoo, very like a flight of angry fighter-aircraft pur-
suing a solitary hedge-hopping bomber. H. E. BATES.
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