Cuckoo
Cuckoo names 3 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Cuckoo a family of birds allied in some respects to the woodpecker
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a family of birds allied in some respects to the woodpecker. There are well on toward two hundred species of cuckoos, and thirty-five are found in the New World. Two toes are directed forward and two backward after the manner of woodpeckers, but the cuckoos use their feet for grasping limbs rather than for climbing. The cuckoo of literature is a widely diffused bird, found in the northern part of the Old World in summer, and in India and northern Africa in winter. In England and temperate Europe its well known note is the harbinger of spring. The cuckoo is a grayish bird about fourteen inches in length. It lays an egg no larger than that of the skylark, and has incurred a bad reputation by neglecting to build a nest of its own. Single eggs are deposited stealthily in the nests of small birds to be hatched by hedge sparrows, wagtails, skylarks, robins, thrushes, and buntings. The young cuckoo is all greed and appetite. It soon shoulders its foster brothers and sisters out of their own nest. The foster parents, the owners of the nest, work untiringly in their frantic attempts to keep its crying mouth full of worms. As soon as able to fly, it goes off and leaves them. The young cuckoo, therefore, though deserted by its own parents, is the type of ingratitude. Although outranked by the skylark and the nightingale, the cuckoo was one of the earliest songsters to attract the attention of English poets. The following bit of lyric is of unknown date and authorship, but it precedes Chaucer by some centuries. With modernized spelling it runs as follows: Summer is a-coming too, Loud sings cuckoo. Groweth seed and bloweth mead And springeth the wood new, Sing cuckoo, cuckoo. The red-billed and the yellow-billed American cuckoos have better manners than their British cousin. They breed throughout the eastern part of North America and winter in the tropics. Both lay from three to five greenish eggs in nests, usually resembling those of a dove, and feed their own young, chiefly with caterpillars. Many German homes contain specimens of the famous cuckoo clock. In place of striking, a clever imitation of the cuckoo calls the hour. Yellow-billed cuckoo
Cuckoo a well known bird
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a well known bird. The head and upper parts are of dark ash, the throat, the under side of the neck and fore part of the breast of a paler ash or brown, the rest of the breast and the belly white, with transverse undulating black lines, the quill feathers with white on their inner webs, the tail ash, white, and black commingled, feet yellow; length, 14 inches. The cuckoo forces foster-parentage on other species of birds. CUCKOO FLOWER or LADY'S- SMOCK (Cardamina pratensis), a common and pretty meadow plant, order Cruciferæ, with pale lilac or white flowers. C. pratensis is abundant in Great Britan and is found in swamps N. of New York.
Cuckoo a genus of common bush-birds in Africa
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a genus of common bush-birds in Africa, India, and through the Malayan Archipelago to Australia. The hindtoe is prolonged into a very long spur. Their call is loud and in some cases apparently ventriloquistic.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 claim that cuckoos are "allied in some respects to the woodpecker" rested on the shared arrangement of two toes forward and two back; DNA studies have since shown this is convergence, and cuckoos are now placed nowhere near the woodpeckers, their closest living relatives being such birds as turacos and bustards. The brood parasitism both accounts report with moral disapproval — the young cuckoo as "the type of ingratitude" — has become one of the best-studied problems in evolutionary biology, with long-term fieldwork on English fens showing an arms race in which female cuckoos specialise on particular hosts and lay eggs mimicking theirs, while hosts learn to reject them. The bird itself has fared badly: the British breeding population has fallen steeply since the 1980s and the cuckoo is now on the UK red list, and satellite tags fitted from 2011 finally traced British birds to wintering grounds in the Congo basin rather than the "India and northern Africa" of Aiton's account. In North America, the western population of the yellow-billed cuckoo praised for its "better manners" was listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act in 2014.
Written for this edition, 2026.