Crackpot

Usage examples of cuckoo.

Chapter VII Instinct Instincts comparable with habits, but different in their origin -- Instincts graduated -- Aphides and ants -- Instincts variable -- Domestic instincts, their origin -- Natural instincts of the cuckoo, ostrich, and parasitic bees -- Slave-making ants -- Hive-bee, its cell-making instinct - - Difficulties on the theory of the Natural Selection of instincts -- Neuter or sterile insects -- Summary.

Soon, they were swamped with the language of fistiana, with cheering swells and rapid-fire descriptions of a brute struggle between two cherubic assassins on cauliflower row, each landing pancake blows that knocked the gallery gods cuckoo.

So saying, I took a pistol and vigorously stripped the sheets off the cuckoo who had got into my nest.

It is a species of cuckoo, but its note, so often mentioned in haiku and in other forms of Japanese poetry, is not what this seems to imply.

As Smith, for the ninth or tenth time, knocked out his pipe on a bar of the grate, the cuckoo clock in the kitchen proclaimed the hour.

More skim-milk coloured, but known by lanceolate leaves - cuckoo bushes.

Nor do the long-drawn notes of the nightingale, nor even the jolly cuckoo, nor the tree pipit, no, nor even the soft coo of the turtle-dove and the smell of the May flower.

Seated in an overstuffed armchair, Tolley began to relax, feeling like a fledgling cuckoo as the Beaumonts fluttered about, plying him with hot, milky tea and a stack of biscuits and small, buttery cakes.

Soon, the wryneck would be calling, and the cuckoo ringing the valley with its double note.

The wryneck was thought to build the nest, and hatch and feed the young of the cuckoo.

The jays were going cuckoo over the Cheezie Nuggies, most definitely savoring the zesty cheddary richness, scurrying back to their nests to regurgitate from their crops their loads of dull little seeds and romping expectantly back to my windowsill for a fresh new load of Nug-gies.

Richmond Park possessed itself, even on that bright day of June, with arrowy cuckoos shifting the tree-points of their calls, and the wood doves announcing high summer.

I fathered upon her in those nights the poker chip, the cash register, the juice extractor, the kazoo, the rubber pretzel, the cuckoo clock, the key chain, the dime bank, the pantograph, the bubble pipe, the punching bag both light and heavy, the inkblot, the nose drop, the midget Bible, the slot-machine slug, and many other useful and humane cultural artifacts, as well as some thousands of children of the ordinary sort.

Perhaps cuckoos have only in recent centuries started parasitizing their present hosts, and will in a few centuries be forced to give them up and victimize other species.

I sometimes used to talk on walks in Surrey when I was a kid - Green Line bus, a few hours in the woods - and it was my fault the cuckoo or redstart or fieldfare or siskin flew away, and never came back the whole day.