Is there a scene more horrifying than the baby cuckoo alone in a nest: the waxy skin, the eyeballs covered in the skull, the sunken back – evolved to help it scoop the other eggs over the edge and on to the ground. Nobody has taught the baby how to eliminate its adoptive siblings. The cuckoo hatches with this instinct driving it: a natural born “obligate brood parasite”.
When a common European cuckoo has successfully laid her egg in a reed warbler’s nest, she “gives a chuckle call, as if in triumph”: the call sounds like a sparrowhawk, a predator, which distracts the host. “The female cuckoo enhances her success by manipulating a fundamental trade-off in host defences between clutch and self-protection,” the authors who discovered this wrote, in a paper titled Female cuckoo calls misdirect host defences towards the wrong enemy. In one summer, a female cuckoo can lay 25 malevolent eggs.
The baby cuckoo grows. It takes up the entire nest. The spiny feathers, the blank eye, the wide yellow mouth as the bill opens again. More! More!
As an adult, the cuckoo calls in spring. That call, or “pleyn” as Chaucer wrote, compared with the nightingale who can “breke” the song in her “throte”, has freaked people out for centuries. The repetition, the call heard only at certain times of the year, breaks time – even if you don’t think about why the cuckoo is calling (to find a mate, to lay an egg, to leave again).
In Scotland and France it is bad luck to hear a cuckoo before breakfast. In Germany, where Kuckuck is a euphemism for the devil, a cuckoo’s call heard while eating a meal once augured a year of hunger; in Norway, a cuckoo heard calling from the north brings death. In Japanese woodblock prints, a cuckoo – hototogisu – is often falling headfirst from the sky: Hokusai depicts it as though seen just from underneath, twisted slightly, you see the soft white feathers of the throat, the open beak.
Aristophanes wrote a play, The Birds (it won second place at a festival in 414BC), in which two Athenians, frustrated by the constant political debate in the city, ask a hoopoe bird to “direct us to some cosy town, in which one can repose as if on thick coverlets”. After chatting about what makes for a good city, one of the Athenians, Pisthetaerus, has an idea: the hoopoe should build a land in the sky so that birds no longer need to bother flying. They decide to call the land “cloud cuckoo land”.
Because the land would interrupt the nourishing smoke that rises from earthly sacrifices to the gods, the birds could become gods themselves. “In this way you will reign over mankind as you do over the grasshoppers and cause the gods to die of rabid hunger,” says Pisthetaerus.
In 2016, with Boris Johnson hours away from announcing his leadership bid, Michael Gove, the man meant to be his running mate, called Johnson’s campaign manager to announce that he would be running himself. But by midday, Johnson was no longer a candidate: Gove had shoved him out from the inside, in what was called a “cuckoo nest plot”. As the succession of new Tory leaders continues, British democracy is an exhausted reed warbler; there are no thick coverlets in sight.
A new day, a new murderous hatchling, and we all have to think about it. Who will feed it? Not the thing that brought it there. It’s their cloud cuckoo land, we’re just living in it – or under it, where they shit on our heads. As the Scottish National party’s Angus MacNeil once said (of Brexit), it’s “crazy, silly, nuts, wacky, cuckoo, potty, daft, cracked, dippy, bonkers – the list goes on’’. Or as one character in The Birds says on arriving in cloud cuckoo land, “Oh! democracy! Whither, oh! Whither are you leading us?”
Cuckoos and the species that “host” them have been in a coevolutionary arms race that predates Athenian democracy, each adapting to outwit the other. Now, as these species race against us, too, their habitats are overlapping less and less, leaving fewer places for the cuckoo to lay her eggs. What will we lose when we rarely hear the cuckoo’s call? A feeling, a memory, a portal, a poem, a play, a woodcut.
In Japan, in 1690, Matsuo Bashō wrote:
Even in Kyoto
I long for Kyoto –
a hototogisu
Helen Sullivan’s first book, Calcium-Magnesium, will be published in Australia in 2023
