The ways of the cuckoo

Many signs herald the arrival of spring: cowslips adorning the banks and meadows with their soft yellow, hawthorn hedges starting to show incipient green, but the greatest of all signals is cried from the treetops by the common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), the true harbinger of the season. Although the cuckoo’s call is distinctive, the bird itself is rarely seen and then always as a lone specimen, for pairs only get together when mating.

One of the earliest known English canons, written in the mid-13th century, celebrates the arrival of the warm months with their meadows in bloom, the newly green woods – and the call of the cuckoo:

Sumer is icumen in (Summer has come in)

Lhude sing cuccu (Loudly sing cuckoo).

There is much folklore about the bird, which features in many nursery rhymes, traditions – while in England, one of the stories about the Wise Men of Gotham tells how they built a hedge round a tree in order to trap a cuckoo, so that it would always be summer.