Nick Davies has spent a lifetime studying this most infamous of birds, and he supplies history and science of the highest order
The incessant, two-note call of the cuckoo, insinuating its way into the April air from dawn to dusk, has been celebrated across Britain and Europe for centuries as a sign that summer is just around the corner. The cuckoo appeared in Chaucer and Shakespeare, and first sightings of it are traditionally recorded on the letters page of the Times newspaper. Its arrival lifts the heart of every birder – and anyone else who hears it – each year.
And yet the cuckoo is also, as Nick Davies points out, a forger, a killer and a cheat. Famously – and uniquely among British birds – it lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, allowing them to do the hard work of raising the monstrous cuckoo offspring, after it has cast their own eggs or chicks aside.
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