The people on The Times letters desk get frightfully upset if you talk about cuckoos. They tell you that The Times has never run correspondence about the first cuckoo: that the whole thing is fantasy, urban myth, and as such deeply unfair to the newspaper.
It all harks back to ancient days when a cuckoo could be regarded as a basic human right. Everyone was going to hear a cuckoo at some stage: the pleasure was in the first one, the one that told you spring had uncompromisingly sprung. And it was of course more sporting if you heard yours ahead of anyone else.
I remember hearing cuckoos on Streatham Common in South London as a boy and not being at all surprised. Cuckoos were part of the way of the world: their ubiquity and abundance was no more remarkable than the rising of the sun in the morning. The sound of the cuckoo was part of the pulse of the year.
Now any correspondence would be about if — not when — you heard a cuckoo. These days most people go through the year without hearing a cuckoo at all. I’ve managed that myself, despite being (a) a birder and (b) a country-dweller.
But not since I moved to Norfolk. Our small scrap of marsh on the edge of the Broads has been echoing with cuckoos for the past five weeks. The air has been full of the frantic male twin-syllable call, imploring any females to come flying across the watery landscape and make more cuckoos.
Is it the same bird? Or are there several males hanging around in the same area, making the same sort of circuit around the big skies above the warbler-thronged reeds? About an hour after dawn there is always one in full voice: shouting the same two syllables at the world again and again.
On and off throughout the day I’m reminded of my own adolescence, when all I really wanted to do was to stand up in a high place imploring “Sex please! Sex please!” – until some gorgeous female obliged me.
It never happened like that, alas. And perhaps it hasn’t happened to the cuckoo or cuckoos of the marsh. Certainly I haven’t heard the rare, thrilling bubbling call of a female as she answers a male with an equal and opposite passion and the two fly towards each other on a glorious amorous collision course.
We’re running short of cuckoos. No one is quite sure why: that’s; the problem of being a migrant. There may be problems at home, and there may be more problems anywhere between here and their West African wintering grounds. The British Trust for Ornithology is doing some high-quality research, tracking cuckoos on their journey, and they need our support.
Cuckoos have made the dreaded transition from ordinary birds to special birds: bird that make you rejoice when you come across them, birds that you worry about at all other times. Birds that tell us that we are getting too much wrong.
But here around the marsh I have the illusion of plenty, and I can at least take heart in that. There’ll be calling away for at least another week; I hope they have success in that time and that the air will be full of gorgeous females.
One more week of listening to their twin-syllabled pleas.
Not gone.
Not quite.
Not yet.
Still here.
Right on.
Sex please.
Pat Leighton says
29 May 2015 at 12:46 pmHoping to hear cuckoo on the Isles of Scilly where we’ll be for the next couple of weeks. Not heard them in a long while in Barrow Gurney, North Somerset, though I know they have been reported not too far away at a wildlife reserve near Portishead, on the Bristol Channel.
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:54 pmWorth a pilgrimage. Good luck in Scilly.
Debby Horsman says
29 May 2015 at 12:53 pmSo far this year I have heard male cuckoos in Devon (near Lynton), Herefordshire and north Beds – I have yet to hear a female’s reply. A privilege!
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:55 pmI believe the females are still quite important in this arrangement. Hope you can find one.
Eric Wright says
29 May 2015 at 1:53 pmNo shortage here in Teruel, Spain. Maybe they’re fed up of the English weather; after all, sex in the sun is hard to beat !!
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:55 pmSpain is so much handier for West Africa after all. Envy you that.
Olly says
29 May 2015 at 3:28 pmI’m lucky enough to hear cuckoos quite often here in Suffolk (near Bury St Edmunds). I never take it for granted and whenever I hear them, I always think of their plight and hope that one day, we’ll be able to hear them all over the place. Make sure you support the BTO Cuckoo tracking project – it’s fascinating and will hopefully help these fantastic birds make a bit of a recovery.
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:56 pmRight on. We need more cuckoos.
Andy Lloyd Williams (Mrs) says
29 May 2015 at 10:22 pmLucky you hearing cuckoos! How wonderful. Living outside Bath, I can’t remember the last time we heard them here.
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:57 pmYour local wildlife trust would tell you where best to start looking for them. Worth making a pilgrimage, but perhaps better leave it till next year now.
Andy Lloyd Williams says
1 June 2015 at 10:38 pmGood idea, thank you for replying.
Mark says
30 May 2015 at 2:27 pmSimon, what’s your secret? So many nature lovers — and nature writers — are a grim lot, mourning each species decline instead of thrilling to the wonder of a gorgeous Spring morning with the joy it deserves. Birders are the worst, so focused on numbers. I try to keep my distance lest they harsh my groove. So why aren’t you gloomy? Eh?
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:58 pmDon’t think I don’t mourn the loss of biodiversity and bioabundance. It’s something we all need to fight for.
Pat Leighton says
30 May 2015 at 5:45 pmHere we go….. Cuckoo just heard in a stand of trees, above the bay at Pelistry, St Mary’s, IOS. Oh joy!
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:59 pmNice one, Pat.
Brian Goldfarb says
30 May 2015 at 9:48 pmFunny that, I read somewhere or other (not here) that elsewhere in the world certain predated species of the Cuckoo had wised up to the Cuckoo’s methods of ensuring that someone else took care of their offspring. That same source wondered whether this might not be happening here, given that the Cuckoo population appeared to be declining.
Is there any truth in this memory of mine?
Simon Barnes says
1 June 2015 at 9:59 pmFascinating thought, I’ll look into that one.
Pat Leighton says
14 June 2015 at 4:06 pmAnother Scilly cuckoo! On our last afternoon on St Agnes, we heard, then saw, a cuckoo. It was on the tidal island of Gugh, which adjoins St Agnes. This was the only other cuckoo we encountered during our time on Scilly, although there were other cuckoo sightings elsewhere on Scilly during our stay.
Simon Barnes says
18 June 2015 at 9:39 pmSome of the finest Japanese haiku are about the Japanese cuckoo, which has a different but equally far carrying call.
Pat Leighton says
19 June 2015 at 8:02 amThanks for this – found some interesting stuff on-line. The inscrutable Japanese seem to have it nailed – mourning, longing, melancholy – the cuckoo calls.
Lucy pryce says
29 June 2015 at 4:01 pmCuckoo heard on St Mary’s Isles of Scilly 26/06/2015 early morning· Bliss to hear it – bliss to be in Scilly! Up until 2 years ago I heard them in west oxfordshire early mornings.
Robert Hinde says
20 May 2016 at 7:14 pmIn mid-May at Goathland, near Whitby in North Yorkshire, cuckoos – certainly at least two of them – were calling regularly. A heart lifting experience after many years of not having heard as cuckoo call. They were common when I was a boy in Cheshire in the 1940s and 50s.