THE CUCKOO

The month was May, the place was the Heron Wood, which was ablaze with wild hyacinths and pansies, and full of singing-birds. If you have ever been through the wood you must know the little open space in the middle with the pond to which a stray wild duck comes now and again in cold weather. From one corner of the pond you can see right down the slope to the wood’s end, along a path now overgrown with ferns and weeds, but, in the old preserving days, a ride cut to enable the squire to shoot his pheasants. There a Vixen had her earth. She could see over the approach to the wood and yet remain unseen, so she was well content.

YOUNG CUCKOO [Photo by C. Reid]

A bird that seemed at first sight to be a sparrow-hawk came into the wood above the ride, hard-pressed by a flock of sparrows and finches that were pursuing it with loud, angry cries. Once among the trees, the hunted one was lost to its pursuers, who gave up the chase and returned twittering to the open. The Vixen sat quite still. Suddenly she heard the flutter of leaves, as strong wings passed between them, and in another minute the bird that might have been taken for a sparrow-hawk lighted on the branch of the black-thorn above her, lowered his head, drooped his wings, spread his tail out to the fullest extent and called, “Cuc-koo,” he cried, “Cuc-koo, cuc-cuk-koo”.

“Well, I am surprised,” said the Vixen, “I thought you were a hawk.”

“So did the hedge-sparrows and the green-finches, and the yellow-hammer,” laughed the Cuckoo. “It was very amusing, particularly as they could not get near me. But I would not like them to catch me in the open.”

“Then why do you try to appear like a hawk when you’re a cuckoo,” said the Vixen. “Trouble enough comes to all of us without asking for it. At least I think so.”

“I’m not so foolish as you think,” explained the bird, whose plumage, now it could be seen closely, was very drab and undistinguished, just a dirty grey with brown markings, and nothing of the gloss that belongs to the feathers of the hawk tribe. “You see, I’m quite a defenceless bird. My bill is not made to deal with anything harder than insects. I’m not built for fighting. Now I’m a fair size, and every hawk can see me when I fly abroad. If they knew me for a cuckoo, I’d not do much good for myself, the first that saw me would have a free meal. So I imitate their flight and all their actions, and they take me for one of themselves. In this way I am safe to go from place to place; but there is the drawback that all the little hawk-haters of the woods and hedges are deceived too, and they mob me as you have seen. However, we can’t expect to have unmixed good luck, and deception involves trouble. Upon my word, I’m almost as wise as the brown owl himself.”

“How do you manage the imitation so well?” asked the Vixen. “I’m not readily deceived, but I thought you were a hawk.”

“Just practice,” he replied. “When I’m feeding I can twist and turn up and down any way you like, and when I’m trying to hide I can slip in and out among branches in a way your eye could not follow. But when I go into the open where there may be hawks about, I take a straight flight, keep my tail spread out, utter no sound at all and go across the fields as though I were on the look-out for little birds.”

“And what are you doing in this part?” asked the Vixen suspiciously. She was not pleased to see strangers in the wood.

“I’ve been about since early April,” replied the Cuckoo. “I’ve taken up my summer quarters here, and I don’t mind telling you that there is no room for any other male cuckoo in this wood. I had to make an exception to my general rule of peaceful living and fight one of my own tribe for possession of this pitch. I won, and he has gone across the river.”

“What about your mate?” she asked him, and the Cuckoo smiled again, rather wickedly.

“I don’t mind allowing any really charming lady cuckoo to call for a few days, but she can’t stay,” he replied. “My instincts are those of a bachelor.”

The Vixen thought it best to change the subject.

“What part have you come from?” she said.

“My winter home is in the centre of Africa,” he replied. “A place south of the equator full of tropical forests, where there are lions and hippopotami and a few black people in towns and villages where a white man has never been seen.

“We leave there in March and come north. On our way through Morocco or Algeria some of us stop, unwilling to cross the sea. You can hear us in the forests of Ma’mora and Argan, and in the woods of the country of the Beni M’gild. But the most of us persevere and leave Africa and come into Spain. There the great spotted cuckoo, who is my cousin, stays and spends his summer. He is four inches longer than I am; he has a crest on his head, and white under-parts. He does not thrive as he might, for his wives will put their eggs in magpies’ nests, and those birds are not good foster-parents. My cousins say that the country north of Spain is too cold for them; but we say they are too idle or too cowardly to take the longer journey. We take it, however, making the sea passage as short as possible, and travelling in separate parties.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked the Vixen curiously, and keeping her eyes upon him as though she feared a surprise.

“You see we male birds come first, and the other folk follow,” he explained. “They come about a week later than we do. We all land in the South and go quite at our leisure to the northern counties and to Scotland. One part of these islands is like any other to us so long as there are plenty of insect-eating birds in the neighbourhood. This year I arrived about the 6th of April.”

“Nobody heard your voice before the 14th,” remarked the Vixen, for she knew every sound from copse and woodland.

“We wait for our females before we sing,” said the Cuckoo, “and when our notes are heard for the first time there is quite a flutter of excitement in birdland. Dozens of birds come round to ask us what we are and where we come from; they are in their first year, and have forgotten our notes. Some of the elders want to hear the news from Africa. Unfortunately, the novelty soon wears off. Our women-folk can’t call as we do. They have nothing better than a husky note with something like a common chuckle in it. They try to say ‘cuc,’ and it sounds like ‘kwook’. And now I’ve said quite enough for one day, and I’m going to find some dinner.”

He must have lighted not very far away, for he called merrily and persistently during the next few minutes, and the notes thrilled through the wood, giving to every living thing the assurance that summer had returned at last. The Vixen waited awhile, and heard a mild, meek “kwook-oo-oo,” that seemed to be the confidential reply of some fair lady of the family, then she went back to her earth. Perhaps the Cuckoo had seen or heard his partner and had gone to a more remote corner to call to her.

Through the long nights of May and June the Cuckoo seemed to be nearly always awake. He was quite the last of the woodland birds to go to sleep and the first to wake up. The Vixen would hear his call break the silence of the Heron Wood before three o’clock in the morning, when she was waiting for her lord’s return. It was not always the familiar cuc-koo accented on the first syllable, but sometimes cuc-cuc-koo, and sometimes, though not often, cuc-koo-koo. He was comparatively shy; most of the cuckoos that passed over the meadow, calling as they flew, were hen birds, and it was seldom that he answered their call. One morning in early June, when the Vixen was playing with her cubs in the shaded corner by the water, he slipped through the leaves, lighted on a branch above her head, spread his tail and called loudly, jerking his body with each note as though the effort was a considerable one, and he did not want any of the significance of the cry to be lost.

“Why don’t you keep your singing for the daytime,” said one of the fox cubs, the biggest in the litter, “instead of waking me up before sunrise?”

“Well,” he replied, “you must not grumble at that. Other birds sleep soundly because they have been busy all day building their nests or helping to hatch the eggs or feed the little ones. Naturally enough, then, the evening finds them tired out, and they sleep until the sun wakes them. But cuckoos are the wisest birds in all the world. They want to enjoy the spring and summer without the hard labour that others practise. So I have no nest to build, no wife to keep, no young to tend, and I know the Heron Wood in all its beauty as no other bird can hope to. A very few hours give me all the sleep I require, and when I wake and see the summer decorating the beautiful wood, I must tell how grateful I am. It is by my help that the wood returns thanks for the gift of summer at all hours of the day and night, for when the late woodlark ceases his song I resume mine.”

“That explanation may satisfy you,” the Vixen interrupted, “but I am not sure that it convinces me. For you seem to shirk your duties, and you can have no share in the joy of the birds that work; you are not a father.”

“You don’t know much about it,” cried the Cuckoo merrily. “Follow me now, if you please.”

So the Vixen, leaving her cubs to gambol about the little patch of green-sward, followed, and he went lightly through the wood until he came to a bush where two accentors, known to the village lads as hedge-sparrows, had a nest.

“Show yourself,” he whispered, and when she did so the sitting bird flew away hurriedly, leaving six pale-blue eggs exposed to view.

“Look carefully,” said the cuckoo with a chuckle, and the Vixen saw that one egg was rather larger than the rest, and had some tiny black specks that might have been overlooked at first sight.

“Come away,” whispered the Cuckoo. “I don’t like to be seen about here. But I’ll tell you in confidence that I’m the father of the big blue egg.”

They moved off quietly to the more secluded corner of the wood where the cubs had found some rabbits to play with.

“If boys saw the nest they might not recognise that as a cuckoo’s egg at all. Some eggs have red or brown blotches on a grey-white ground; they were not like this one, and you would not see them in a hedge-sparrow’s nest. They would be in a blackbird’s home by the side of the ten-acre meadow, or a warbler’s on the marsh, or in a wagtail’s nest.”

“I was born in this wood in a hedge-sparrow’s nest three years ago,” said the Cuckoo, on another morning when he sat on a bough above the Vixen’s earth, “and when I am a father the egg is always blue. The mother of the egg you have just seen visited me for a few days at the end of May and laid this egg for me on the ground. You see I had no nest to offer her. So soon as we saw that the colour was blue, as I expected it to be, we scoured the wood for a nest that had eggs similar to it. We soon found the hedge-sparrow’s. Then we waited patiently for both birds to go for an airing, and my mate took the egg up in her mouth and flew with it to the nest. There she left it, and on the following day I said good-bye to her and she went away.”

“Will she lay any more eggs this year?” the Vixen asked him.

“It is quite possible,” replied the Cuckoo, “at intervals of a week or ten days, but they will be no concern of mine, in fact, they may not even be blue. But they will all find a place in the nests of birds that have our tastes in food. In parts where there are no insect-eating birds you would have to search a long time to find a cuckoo.”

“Do the hedge-sparrows, and warblers, and pipits and the rest of them realise the trick you have played upon them?” she asked him. “My mother once chose a badger’s earth for her home and I was the only one that got out alive.”

“Never,” he replied lightly. “They only think one of their eggs is a little unlike the rest, that’s all. You know our eggs are quite small for our size. And when they are all hatched the parents must work harder than they expected to, for a young cuckoo can eat as much as the rest of the family put together.”

Some fourteen or fifteen days after the strange egg had been put in it, a blind ugly cuckoo came from the shell in the hedge-sparrow’s nest, calling for food. The little hedge-sparrows had not yet appeared, but the unoccupied parent bird had all his work cut out to keep the newcomer satisfied. He was constantly on the wing through the wood in search of insects, and very often strayed to the orchard of Home Farm, where fat green caterpillars, most luscious morsels, were to be found among the currant bushes. And all that time the Father Cuckoo was living at ease on the fat of the land.

“I met that hard-working hedge-sparrow this morning,” he said to the Vixen, when he took his favourite place on the branch of an elder above her earth; “he was coming to the orchard as I left it. What a splendid arrangement it is to be sure. I’m sure my baby will be well fed, and that foster-father seems to enjoy the work. Let him thank his good luck there are not two of my family in his nest. If there were, he would have no time to feed himself or his mate.”

“Do the hens ever put two eggs into one nest?” said the Vixen.

“Only by accident,” he replied. “Sometimes it happens that a hen carries an egg to a nest, and deposits it there without noticing that some other hen has been before her. She would not carry two of her own eggs to the same nest. Hers is too keen a sense of affection for the unborn; she knows as well as I do that there is quite enough work for any pair of small birds in the raising of a single cuckoo.”

The little hedge-sparrows were born only to die. Their ungainly foster-brother was clamorous for all the food that reached the nest, and he could not stretch himself without danger to the little ones. Do not let it be said that he deliberately murdered them; but before they were three days old all lay dead on the ground below the hedge. The parent birds did not seem to feel their loss very keenly. Probably this was their second brood, and the earlier one had been reared successfully; for the nest, built of wool and horsehair and soft mosses, is always one of the first to appear in the Heron Wood, and, being badly hidden, is preyed upon by all unscrupulous egg-eating birds, or egg-collecting boys.

This one was hardly two feet from the ground, and might have escaped notice, had not the cuckoo-mother been looking for such an one. But even the Vixen who was not tender-hearted could not help feeling sorry for the hard-working couple, kept constantly busy to feed the thief who had thrown their proper offspring out of the nest with such complete unconcern. Possibly their hard work served to help them to forget their troubles.

Father Cuckoo to admit any responsibility though the Vixen, having a mother’s feelings for the time being, remonstrated with him.

“You can’t blame a young cuckoo, not a fortnight old for being hungry, and wanting all the food,” he said. “And you can’t blame me or his mother, for we were both brought into the world in the same fashion, and know no other. There are cousins of ours in America who make nests and bring up their young in the usual fashion; but for unknown generations they have had this custom, and we, on the other hand, have had ours.

“Nobody can explain these things. Why should I have such dull, ugly feathers, for example, when some of my African cousins have a plumage that shines as though each feather had been dipped in gold? Twice a year I moult, never without a hope that the new suit will be a brilliant one. But I remain dull and shabby; my partners are like me, and have no taste for domesticity.

“On the other hand, we can enjoy the knowledge that we are among the best loved birds in the world, so far as mankind is concerned; that thousands associate the summer with our song, and find the woodland empty when we are summoned south again. All these things are matters of natural law, and you must take us as we are, while we take the world as we find it.”

“What you say may satisfy you,” said the Vixen severely; “but it cannot be expected to satisfy the hedge-sparrow.”

“Perhaps there is no need to think about them,” rejoined the Cuckoo. “You must know that if those birds were left undisturbed, they would raise from twelve to eighteen young every season, for the hens lay three times. In a few years there would be hedge-sparrows in clouds, far more than the land can support. So Nature teaches them to set their nests in open places, where Robin, the horseman’s lad, and all his school companions, may take the eggs by the dozen, and the magpie or the rook may help themselves.”

“Well,” she said, “you won’t deny that the mother cuckoo is quite heartless?”

“I do deny it,” replied the father. “She will be somewhere near the nest, and will make it her business to see that the youngster is doing well. So soon as he is able to fly she will take charge of him and bring him up in the way he should go. She keeps an eye on all her family.”

“But how came he to kill the little birds?” persisted the Vixen. “We only kill for food at this time of year.”

“Just want of room,” replied the parent bird. “I can assure you there is no vice in him. When a young cuckoo wakes to life in a small nest, his first instinct is to make room for himself. I’m rather surprised to think that my son did not throw the eggs out right away. That is what I did when I was born in this wood. I wriggled and wriggled until I had them one after the other on the flat of my back, and then hoisted them over the side. There can’t be any blame for me in the matter, because the instinct came to me as naturally as my hunger. A cuckoo’s egg only takes a fortnight in the hatching, so the cuckoo baby is generally in time to throw other eggs out of the nest. When two cuckoos have got into the same nest by mistake, the two baby birds fight, and the weaker one goes out with the other eggs or the small birds. If two cuckoo eggs get placed in one nest, the cuckoo that is born first is the lucky one. Even a blackbird’s nest can’t hold two cuckoos. Perhaps it is our quarrelsome nature when young that made some mother cuckoos lay eggs in alien nests.”

The Vixen wondered whether these incidents had anything to do with the mobbing of the cuckoo by the small birds when he went abroad. They seemed more reasonable as an explanation than the sparrow-hawk theory.

The baby cuckoo was soon fledged, and left nest and wood at the same time, leaving his father in sole possession. As the summer wore away, the call changed considerably and ceased to have the fresh ring about it. There was no loss of health to the bird associated with the failing voice. On the contrary, he was in splendid condition, and ate heartily of all the good things the wood provided—moths, caterpillars, beetles and even butterflies. The indigestible parts of these dainties he ejected in pellets, just as though he had been an owl. With the end of July his notes had quite gone; other cuckoos were coming into the district in great numbers, and were allowed to enter the wood unchallenged.

“They are from the north of England and from Scotland,” he explained. “They leave early so as to be down here in good time, for we shall all go south together. Some have come all the way from the mountains of Sutherlandshire.”

“But the young ones can’t face the journey yet,” said the Vixen. “Many of them are not yet six weeks old. My cubs take longer to learn to help themselves.”

A TWO DAYS OLD CUCKOOEjecting a young Titlark and Eggs from its nest.[Photo by T. A. Metcalfe

“That’s all right,” explained the Cuckoo; “the birds, you see, are all old ones; in fact, all the mother birds are three years old at least. The season’s children wait in England some weeks longer than we do, and travel together. Their mothers have told them all about the road, and we all have an instinct that keeps us from taking a wrong direction.”

“Why don’t they accompany you?” inquired the Vixen.

“It is hard to say why we have our call in August unless it is to get home before moulting time,” replied the Cuckoo, “but as far as the youngsters are concerned, I should say that they could not stand the heat of our winter home in August. We get there before September, and they are seldom with us before October, and then the country is more fit for young birds that have known no warmth worth mentioning. Coming south gradually in September, they can enjoy what awaits them at the journey’s end.”

“Have you a special day for your departure?” she asked. “I shall be off to the osiers in September and I’d like to see you go.”

“When we have received our marching orders,” replied the bird, “or as you might say, knowing no better, when the instinct for departure is upon us, we await the first fine night with a wind blowing towards the south. Have you ever noticed how the winds help birds at the season of the great migrations? They do, whether you have noticed it or not.”

For some days in the beginning of August the fields and woods showed a large number of cuckoos now quite mute, and then the Vixen prepared to leave the neighbourhood. Cub hunting had started.

“We are ready to fly now,” said the Cuckoo. “The signal has come to us; the wind is backing towards the north.”

“Aren’t you sorry to leave?” she asked him.

“Yes and no,” he replied. “If you had perennial spring and summer I would stay gladly enough. But one of my family was taken half-fledged from a nest here once and lived with clipped wings in an old garden across the river. He has spoken to all of us about the English winter, and it is something we never wish to meet. We are going to a land of such sunshine as you have never seen.”

Half-way through September there was no cuckoo of any age to be heard or seen. And the place seemed to lack something, over and above the crops that had gone from the fields and the green mantle that was fading from the hedgerow and the wood.

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