More crafty than the cuckoo. The cuckoo is never at the pains of building a nest, but having found one belonging to some other bird, fit for her purpose, she throws out the eggs she finds in it, and deposits her own in their place. The owner of the nest, not perceiving the fraud, hatches the cuckoo's egg, and nurtures the young one, thus freeing its mother from all care for her offspring. The cuckoo is a bird of passage; it appears in this country in the month of April, and leaves it in June. The female lays only a single egg, usually in the nest of the hedge-sparrow, as we learn from the following distich.

«The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,
That she had her head bit off by her young».
(Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4)