“Sumer is icumem in,/Lhude sing cuccu” – or “Summer is here,/Loudly sing, cuckoo” – are the opening lines of a much-anthologised medieval poem-song. Well, summer is just about done now and we’ve had far too little sunshine as far as I’m concerned, and very few cuckoos either. The two things are not unconnected.
In the woods across the valley and in Molly Carr Wood on the other side of the hill I’ve heard common cuckoos every spring from 2010 to 2022, but nothing this year and nothing the year before. I was born in May 1963, and I have taken it as both a personal insult and a gloomy omen that these birds stopped singing happy birthday to me in the month I turned 60. Does the Times still receive correspondence about cuckoos from retired vicars in deepest Englandshire? “Sir, while making my daily ambulatory circuit past the old rectory in my former parish of Thrice Dithering, the unmistakable call of spring’s harbinger – the first of the year, might I venture? – was an auditory nourishment to my soul.”
More people have heard cuckoos than seen them, though in truth not many would recognise one if it landed in their soup. Some are close in appearance to the sparrowhawk and have similar flight characteristics, and to the unpractised or uninterested eye, a cuckoo might be mistaken for a pigeon. Even for hardcore birders, sightings are increasingly rare, because the UK common cuckoo population has fallen by three quarters in the past 50 years. The headline reasons are familiar and depressing, and, alongside habitat loss and dwindling food sources, a particular problem for the cuckoo is thought to be the shifting weather pattern. “Sumer is icumem in” earlier these days – or, rather, winter isn’t lasting as long – and as a consequence native British birds are breeding earlier. If cuckoos want to deposit their eggs in active nests, they must leave their feeding grounds in West Africa sooner to begin their migration back across the Sahara, with not enough fuel in their system. The birds that do arrive are presumably weaker and must then contend with the vagaries of the season to come, including heatwaves, drought, violent storms and even frost.
Another reason I’ve taken the recent cuckoo snub to heart is to do with my upbringing in the village of Marsden, of which the cuckoo is the symbolic bird. Villages to the moorland side of Huddersfield have legends attached to them. Marsdeners, so the story goes, believed that the cuckoo brought the spring, and by preventing the bird from leaving, it would remain spring forever. However, the tower they constructed to contain it was built “one course too low”, and that course happened to be the roof. Conclusion: we’re all skinflints or idiots, or both. (The moon rakers of the rival village of Slaithwaite were caught trying to drag the moon’s reflection out of the river, believing it to be a wheel of cheese, though they maintain they were only pretending to be dunces while actually hiding their contraband under a bridge. Yeah, right.)
This association with a lack of intelligence interests me, because although the cuckoo might practise some dirty tricks and dark arts, getting other parents to build your house and feed your kids while you head off to a place in the sun is a kind of genius, right? As it grows, the cuckoo chick will shove other young birds out of the nest, till eventually it sits there like a baby elephant on an egg cup, taking juicy grub from an adult host up to one eighth of its size. Not only that, the cuckoo can lay eggs that match those of its host in colour and pattern, and some varieties can mimic an open gape with part of their wing, making it appear there are more mouths to feed. Stupid? Really?
Gowk or gawk are northern English nicknames for the bird, apparently, although I’m as northern as they come and I’ve never heard anyone use them – and in the words of Belle and Sebastian at their finest, “I’m a Cuckoo.”
[See also: If I could be a tree, I’d be a sycamore]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?