What does a cuckoo bird do or live?

The cuckoo is a bird. Its behavior is so terrible, by human standards, that only wildlife films convinced ornithologists to accept it. Jack Watkins explains.

The male cuckoo’s call, heard in April but sometimes earlier, is a sign of spring in Britain. In the mid-20th century, The Times published the first letters from cuckoo readers after the birds returned from Africa.

The sound can be closer to the bird, as the cuckoo is inconspicuous. However, if you see one, you may be surprised by its size. Before migration was accepted, some believed it could become a hawk and return to its starting point. This explained its absence for most of the year. In fact, with their long wings and tail, as well as with black stripes on their chest, cuckoos can actually resemble hawks.

The distant cuckoo, heard on a quiet spring day, is a great pleasure of nature. But, this is all the fascination the bird can inspire. If the cuckoo were human, he’d be a bandit, a scoundrel, and a fraud. The gray cuckoo is the only British bird that does not raise its own young. It does not build its own nest, but uses other birds to take care of incubation and feeding. Favorite host species, or dupes, include the red, robin, spotted accent, reed, graytail, and willow. The target females incubate the egg and raise the cuckoo. This is despite the brood kicking all the other eggs and chicks out of the nest, sending them to their deaths.

A new cuckoo in the reed nest removes the other cuckoo eggs. It pushes them into the sea on its back, even if its “mother” feeds it.

The foster parents ignore the outrage. They nurture the young cuckoo, who never sees its real mother. It grows to five times its size. As Fool says in King Lear (Act 1, Scene IV): “The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long that its children tore off his head.”

For years, naturalists have struggled to accept the existence of such behavior. Rev. Gilbert White called it “a monstrous rage against motherly love, one of nature’s first great orders.” Others tried to explain it. One of White’s correspondents, Daines Barrington, had a comforting idea. He suggested that the mother cuckoo may have nursed her young. She did this by visiting their foster parents’ nest.

Even when Edward Jenner, known for his work on vaccination, produced a paper in 1787. It described how the young cuckoo left the nest. He observed the adoptive parents, rejected by the Royal Society.

At the start of the 20th century, people speculated about the cuckoo’s parasitism. Then, an eccentric Midlands entrepreneur, Edgar Chance, decided to end the guesswork. In doing so, he became the first ornithologist to devote his studies to a single species.

Chance chose a 50-acre moorland site, Pound Green, in Worcestershire for the observation. Their goal was to show that the cuckoo laid its egg in the nest of the deceived species. Many believe it dropped the egg on the ground and then used its beak to put it in the nest. His short silent film, The Cuckoo’s Secret, is one of the first. It caused a sensation when it first showed at the New Gallery Cinema in London’s Regent Street in 1922.

Chance, absorbed in his project, also slept on the common ground. Being there at dawn, he hoped to catch the cuckoo that lays its egg in a strange hole’s nest. She had tricked him. He learned the event happened that afternoon. The film showed the mother cuckoo rushing to the burrow nest to lay her egg in seconds. It also showed the cuckoo knocking other strangers out of the nest. One observer refused to believe his eyes. He accused Chance of having laid the egg in the nest himself. Another called the film “an insight into the terrible atrocities of the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest.””

Chance followed the film with a book of the same name, which included pictures of Pike. It was later updated and expanded in The Truth About Cuckoos, published in 1940. By this time, however, Chance had fallen into disfavor. Egg collecting played a major role in advancing our knowledge of birds, and he was a devoted oologist. By the 1890s, the conservation movement grew more vocal.

They were concerned that collecting eggs was impacting bird populations.

As a result, laws to protect birds were strengthened.

In 1926, authorities prosecuted Chance under the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1894. He was accused of aiding the collection of illegal, outbred bird eggs. He claimed to collect eggs for the Reading Museum’s science. But, the British Ornithologists’ Union fined him and forced him to resign. When he died in 1955, few in ornithology noted it.

It is in the Edgar Chance collection at the Natural History Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire. Douglas Russell, the museum’s senior curator, says it has 5,038 clutches, or groups of eggs. Of those, 1,651 belong to the gray cuckoo and its hosts. 

Despite this, Chance’s work is now often cited. His egg collection is a popular resource for consultation. In 2015, Nick Davies wrote Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature. He described his visit to Pound Green and “alone in a silent common, saluting the memory of Edgar Chance.” Professor Davies pictured Chance, in his tweed suit and tie, doing the usual. He said his close watch of the cuckoo’s secret “must be one of the greatest feats of field ornithology.”

For naturalists, the behavior of a cuckoo will never lose its ability to amaze. Every time Professor Davies sees this spectacle, it amazes him. This is true whether on screen or at Wicken Fen, where he has studied the birds for decades. He has even seen someone remove nests while the parent was at the nest.

We have not explained all the mysteries of the creature in detail. The young cuckoos are not raised by their real parents. They migrate to Africa in July, while their young are still with their foster parents. So, the birds must find their way to their ancestors’ wintering grounds. The foster parents can’t help them. The migratory species will move to different wintering places. The young cuckoo must travel up to 8,000 kilometers alone. He will raise his siblings in different nests. In Chance’s time, the cuckoo was, as he writes in The Secret of the Cuckoo, “well distributed and present in every varied landscape that the country can offer.”” Since then, our population has dropped by over half, with the largest decline in the last 20 years. The BTO asked if the decline was due to their harsh migration routes. They followed the birds by satellite to find answers.

Chance, a populist, named one of the cuckoo clocks he studied Mary Pickford, after the movie heroine of his era. I would have appreciated that the BTO had named each of the sheets from “Raymond” to “Tennyson.” He wants to “support the conclusions with evidence.” It’s an online follow-up of his progress.