The First Cuckoo

It is a competitive time of year at Highclere - who is going to hear the first cuckoo? John G works very hard to maintain his record but it is by no means an easy victory.

The cuckoo migrates north from Africa where it spends nine months of the year. Traditionally the date of its arrival is 14th April, St. Tiburtius Day, and it is the call of the male – the female makes a trilling bubbling call -which is only heard in the UK. This is also where they lay their eggs.  

Sadly, these days, John G’s challenge is not just to hear the first cuckoo but to hear any cuckoos at all. They were once part of the soundtrack of an English spring and early summer, but numbers in the UK have declined by over three-quarters in the last forty years. They are now on the red endangered list, and fewer than 20,000 pairs remain. There is some regional variation, and they seem to be doing better in Scotland than down here by Highclere. 

Each female cuckoo will lay between 12 and 22 eggs, all in different nests. Interestingly, they tend to opt for the nests of the same species that reared them. The female cuckoos wait until the host has left the nest, sometimes spooking the bird away, then swoop in to lay a single egg. Cuckoos hatch quickly – after just 12 days – and when it hatches its first act is to push any other eggs over the edge of the nest. The “parent birds” will continue to feed the young cuckoo, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is an interloper even though it may grow to two or three times their size.

The young bird therefore never knows its real parents and has to find its migration route entirely on its own. Each bird must therefore have an inbuilt “sat nav” gene since they seem to know how to fly from the UK to the Congo each year. They fly up to 60mph and on migration can fly over a mile above ground level, but the journey is fraught with danger from desert sandstorms, howling winds, torrential rainstorms, hunters and predators. 

Their long, narrow wings are capable of strong high flight but before they set off, they eat as many of the larger insects and caterpillars as they can, storing fat in their throat pits, arm pits and in loops around their stomachs and thighs. Whilst they sometimes fly south over Italy or down over Spain and the western edge of Africa, they always return flying north. 

It is said that “the cuckoo comes in April, she sings her song in May, then in June another tune, and in July she flies away.” 

It seems so sad that Cuckoos are disappearing - they have played a role in human culture for thousands of years. In Greek mythology they are sacred to the goddess Hera whilst in Celtic folklore they were a powerful symbol associated with the changing seasons, the Otherworld, and both life and death. Hearing a cuckoo for the first time while holding money was thought to bring financial prosperity for the year and some people would turn over the coins in their pocket and spit on them to secure this luck. Being in good health when hearing the first call was an omen of continued good health.

 Frederick Delius was an English composer who famously composed the piece of music “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring “.  This opens with a slow three-bar sequence; its first theme is an exchange of cuckoo calls, first for oboe then for divided strings. The second theme is scored for first violins, and is taken from a Norwegian folksong, "In Ola Valley" before the clarinet returns with more cuckoo calls. Delius spent some of his life tin the USA, as well as time in France and Germany, perhaps a migration path of his own. 

My father was a company doctor and on the board of several different companies, one of which was based in Switzerland. He travelled a great deal and every so often when he came back, he would bring us presents. In particular, I remember the brown wooden cuckoo clock he bought back from Switzerland. It lived in our playroom, and it was always a crisis if it did not work and the cuckoo didn’t pop out. I don’t remember what happened to it – like the real thing, it just disappeared.