Reviewed by Lucinda Guy

As deceptively simple as its one-word title, Cuckoo is concise, rich with illustrations, and an approachable read. Its scope is wide, but in discussing just one family of birds, Cuculidae, it is also deep, drawing on both naturalism and literature. The cuckoo is analogous to so many things but spends more time away from Europe than within it, and the net is thrown wide enough here to also draw in cultural representations and meanings from Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Here is a book for the bird-enthusiast with an interest in culture, or the culture-enthusiast with an interest in birds. It opens by asking What is a Cuckoo?, and answers by providing an overview of the biology and classification. This gives the reader a necessary grounding in the natural history—their skeleton, how they move, what they eat, and, most significantly, how they reproduce. Cuckoo’s remaining chapters flit between nature and culture, to deal with the multiple metaphorical purposes of this iconic bird and its two-note song, which delights or maddens those who hear it. The audacity of a bird who lays its eggs in another’s nest has associated the cuckoo with unfaithful women, leading to the heartbroken male’s denomination as a cuckold and object of ridicule (unless—disturbingly—he reacts with violence towards his mate). Hundreds of years of literature have reinforced or subverted this notion, which is brought up to date with the term ‘cuck’ used within current anti-feminist rhetoric, to describe the cuckolded, or otherwise emasculated, individual. Equally derogatory is the association with madness, the person-turned-cuckoo who can only repeat themselves and cause harm to those around them. But, as Chris points out, birds (and the people they stand in for) can only perform to their type—the cuckoo must be a brood parasite, and it must migrate.

Quite apart from these negative associations stands the delight in hearing ‘the first cuckoo of spring’, a Eurocentric position that imagines the cuckoo as part of the northern woodland soundscape. Both its migratory patterns and the predictable song of the male common cuckoo have synchronised it with clock and calendar. The ease of replicating such a predictable melody made the cuckoo the preferred bird of the German clockmaker, and the cuckoo clock, like its namesake, is attributed in literature with driving its audience to madness. The song appears frequently throughout Western art music, often replicated on a recorder or clarinet. Like the automated bird in the cuckoo clock, the tune was easily replicable (my own cuckoo-calling whistle has just one hole). A deeper discussion of the cuckoo’s song can be found in musicologist Elizabeth Eva Leach’s book Sung Birds, on Medieval attitudes to birdsong and its use in composition. Leach notes that the cuckoo is a “season topos” in the troubadour tradition, and argues that, thanks to its consistent tonal ratios, its song is rational, and therefore aligned with human culture. This, along with the cuckoo’s accomplishment in saying a word—its own name—passes the test of being musical, and not just irrational noise as much other birdsong was once considered to be.

Cuckoo ends with a warning. Though not one of the most threatened birds, habitat loss and climate breakdown are not good news for the cuckoo. Chris reminds the reader that we are reliant on the cuckoo to understand and describe human experiences. The cuckoo has been around longer than humanity. Perhaps, then, the human is the interloper, the cuckoo in the nest of the natural world.