There are moments when you grasp a simple and long-accepted truth – something you’ve known all your life – as if for the first time. It might be the beauty of your partner’s eyes or the taste of beer or half a phrase of Bach’s music, and you say to yourself, I knew it was beautiful but my God, I didn’t know it was that beautiful.
Two cuckoos have been calling in our shallow Norfolk Valley for five weeks now. I hear them sometimes at first light, when I’m still in bed, sometimes at my desk as I write, sometimes in the evening before supper. Cuckoos are declining birds and it’s a delight to know that they’re doing all right round here.
At the end of the garden there’s a belter of an ash tree. It stands 15 yards from the hut I work in, right by the place where I sat day after day in the writing of The Year of Sitting Dangerously. So far as I’m concerned, it’s an important tree.
I was on my commute to work: through the garden, a few dozen paces, when the whole world was electrified. Cuckoo! Loud? Sure, but I didn’t know it was that loud. It was deafening, health and safety issue, compromised workplace, don’t take another step without ear defenders. The bird was calling from the upper branches of the ash, I was right below it and the volume was stupefying. How could a single not over-large bird create such a din, and do it again and again and again, day after day after day?
Volume is the cuckoo’s strategy for love and life: make a huge din – a simple, far-carrying, utterly unmistakable call – and hope that a female (a) hears it and (b) prefers you to the other male that’s been cluttering up the airways. A cuckoo needs to heard if it’s to be a success.
But that loud? Really? I stood underneath the ash, the sound penetrating my brain and a drill penetrates rock. And then the bird was off, sharp drooping wings carrying it swiftly towards a different place where it could bust different ears. Cuckoo!
I walked along the River Waveney between Beccles and Oulton Broad about this time last year, perhaps a few weeks earlier, and there were three distinct overlapping cuckoo calls. I managed to get right underneath one of them, and as you say, it was very loud, but I still couldn’t spot him!
You generally have to wait until they fly.
Loved your cuckoo story, I hear them a lot at Cley this time of year, but never close up like that, jealous !
I must ask Cindy to make a cuckoo for her installation at the visitors’ centre.
Lovely! We are on the Isle of Coll this week and so, it would seem, are all the other cuckoos. We have been spoilt with the amount we have seen, wonderful. Also seen plenty of hares, which always make me think of Cindy.
Emma (Josie & Mick’s Emma)
Hello Emma! Lovely to hear from you. Glad you’ve had a glut of cuckoos.
Having just reread How to be a Bad Birdwatcher I am now rereading Birdwatching with your eyes closed in order to tune in more to the wonderful birdsong around our back garden. Driving to Dublin on Monday I saw four buzzards and two yesterday coming home. I also saw my first Great Spotted Woodpecker on a Benedictine bird feeder in Glenstal Abbey recently! The world is bursting with birds and all the better for it.
Thanks Bairbre. Are Benedictine bird-feeders evenr better than Franciscan ones?
Speaking as a local I’m pretty sure 3 male cuckoos are shouting their worth this year. I’m still (like them) longing to identify a female!
Hello Isobel — three makes it better again. I hope they all got lucky.
A good year for Cuckoo’s this year at RSPB Fowlmere, my patch, two males clashing in mid air and a female. I spent a morning following their calls trying to photograph them with no success. Really enjoy your posts Simon, keep them coming.
I haven’t heard a female here. Hoping she turned up when I wasn’t listening.
I have only heard a Cuckoo, once. In the 70’s and I was with my Mum. We stood and listened and I was straight back there.
Thanks Simon … I think you got a mega dose of its call for all of us.
Ear defenders in the shape of wings!
Thanks Susas — come to the Broads next May and with luck you’ll find your cuckoo
How wonderful to hear not just one cuckoo but more! I haven’t heard one here in my part of Dorset for a number of years. Sad. Incidentally am currently enjoying “The Year” very much. A tranquil and thoughtful book.
Thanks Anne. Cuckoos busy in the Broads. Delighted you are enjoying Sitting.
Thank you once again for keeping me aware of the wildlife that is not all that faraway, but far enough to be missed. May be my sighting in Bury St Edmunds yesterday of a Red Kite being harassed might make up for it!
I love the way kites light up when they catch the sun.
Beautiful words x
Thanks Rob!
Here in north Norfolk, Simon, I haven’t heard the wonderful call of the cuckoo at all this year. Hope springs eternal that I will hear it before “in the middle of June it changes it’s tune and in July it flies away”.
They like this little valley in the Broads. The BTO satellite-tagged two at my place this tyear.