Spirits lifted by cuckoo

ON a cold day at the end of April, I was out in my garden feeling mildly depressed, writes Dick Warner

The wind had been blowing from the north for weeks, a barren, icy flow of Arctic air.

There was no growth. The plants in the garden were just surviving, waiting for the soil to get warmer.

Then I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. It was very distant and very faint and I had to hold my breath while I waited for it to come again so I could be sure of what I’d heard. But it did happen again and I was right — the distant call of a cuckoo.

In one moment it dispelled all my irritation over the lack of growth in the garden and a silly grin spread across my face. There is no more hopeful and happy sound than the first spring call of the cuckoo.

In fact this moment has inspired many poems, songs, essays, and letters to the editor. It is the theme of the oldest surviving song in the English language ‘Sumer is Icumen In’.

It was written some time in the 1200s in a Wessex dialect of Middle English which needs to be translated to be understood today. But it’s a beautiful and sophisticated piece of music, a round or rota for unaccompanied voices, and the one line that is recognisable when you hear it sung is the refrain ‘sing cuckoo!’.

Where I live in the east Midlands the sound of the cuckoo is much rarer than it was 30 years ago. And there seems to be a pattern to this.

The birds arrive in late April or early May and call for a couple of days while they check the place out and then they leave and they seem to head westwards. Towards the end of May I tend to head for the west myself, in search of some mayfly fishing, and I catch up with the cuckoos again.

There is a reason for this. Irish cuckoos need heather and over the past 30 years most of the great bogs round here have been stripped of their heather and exploited for turf. However, there’s still lots of it in west Galway and Mayo.

Cuckoos breed all over northern Europe and Asia but in each part of their breeding territory they have adapted to use a different species of host bird to rear their young.

Over generations the females have evolved to lay eggs that resemble those of the host (in colour if not in size) so that they are less likely to be rejected by the foster parents.

In Ireland almost all cuckoo eggs are laid in nests belonging to the diminutive meadow pipit. Our meadow pipits are sometimes found in rough meadows but their preferred habitat, particularly for nesting, is mature heather. There are no longer enough pipits around here to hold the cuckoos.