"On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring"

Mr Chris Cuckoo

Mr/Mrs Lyster Cuckoo

Look carefully to the top left of this photograph of Broitzem Wood, where a few fine tree branches poke slightly above the others.  There, believe it or not, on the third branch down, perching over the squirrel who sits to the left, is a cuckoo eating a catapillar!   I think I am right,  hahaha!   That is guess work of course, but while walking home on Tuesday afternoon, I heard him/her out there somewhere in flight,  trying to do his/her dirty work by placing an egg in some other poor bird's nest.   It is not easy to love the cuckoo.

Several cuckoos have  been tracked recently on their annual migrations from East Anglia to Africa, and this website: www.bto.org/cuckoos gives all the information about their wanderings.  Several birds were caught in May 2011 and tagged, and reseachers were able, for the first time, to track their annual, migratory return journeys.  Lyster and Martin, pictured above, were two of the birds, and on the website you can read about the long migratory course of 10401.2 miles return (16753.5 km) they took from East Anglia to Africa.

The research was undertaken to establish a reason for the decline in cuckoo numbers.  Some tagged birds did not make the return journey, disappearing somewhere over Africa.  It will be interesting to know the outcome of this long term research.

Many poems have been written about the cuckoo, and below is my little poem:

The Timmerlah Cuckoo

by Victoria Messam

The cuckoo is a funny bird,

She cuckoos her song in flight,

She lays her eggs in other bird's nests,

The naughty little tyke.

hahahaha!

May 9th. 2012

Frederick Delius composed, "On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring" a tone poem, in 1912.  It is considered to be a perfect evocation of an English spring morning.  However Delius composed it in France, and the theme, based on a Norwegian folk song, provides the sublime melody that runs through the work.  It was performed for the first time in Leipzig on October 2nd 1913.