One won’t make it to the cuckoo’s nest

There is a certain symmetry to the fact that the first victim of illegal hunting this spring happened to be (of all birds) a cuckoo. 

OK, OK, before you all bring your hankies out… let me say up front that this is not going to be another birdbrained epitaph for the cuckoo shot last Wednesday. Enough tears have been shed over that particular bird already; and what with all the lamentation and gnashing of teeth still going on in the background, all that remains is to give it a State funeral, and fly the palace flags at half-mast. 

Nor is this going to be a defence of the man who shot that bird – the ‘cuckoo-killer’, as he has been so predictably dubbed – even though I am inclined to actually believe him when he claims it was a genuine mistake (or at least, that the claim is in itself believable, whether true or not).

These things do happen, even to seasoned birdwatchers. Only when it happens to birdwatchers, the bird doesn’t usually get to pay for the mistake with its life. And the birdwatchers themselves don’t get hauled to court, either… with the result that they will never, ever have to actually admit to the mistake in public. 

But it’s a mistake I’ve made myself… in my green and salad days as a lesser-spotted birdwatcher with the MOSY. A turtle dove and a cuckoo might look completely dissimilar in close-up photographs; but out in the field it’s another story, especially if the birds are seen in flight at a distance. 

Both are roughly the same size, and the tail (a key bird identifier) is roughly the same shape, with similar markings. The rest of the cuckoo is mostly bluish-grey, and the turtle-dove mostly pink-and-gold… and while that may sound like a stark contrast, in truth colour is not always a reliable guide. The turtle dove displays a conspicuous flash of greyish-blue with its wings open and tail spread: i.e., in full flight. Meanwhile, the cuckoo’s plumage is soft and velvety, and depending on the light its exact tint is not always obvious at a glance. 

Most important of all, the two birds have very similar flight patterns: both tend to burst suddenly out of nowhere, and their spasmodic wing-beating rhythm and general flight trajectory seem to belong to the same basic avian school of aerodynamics.  

So yes, it is easy to confuse the two species. You need to get a good, proper look to notice their distinguishing features: the cuckoo’s white underside, or the length of its beak and tail (though similarly-shaped, the cuckoo’s tail is longer and slightly V-shaped); the entirely different head-shape (unlike doves, cuckoos have no distinct neck to speak of – their head just tapers towards the beak), and one or two of the individual markings (speckled wings and for turtle dove, underbelly stripes for cuckoo, etc). Only then can you identify the bird with 100% accuracy.

You need, in other words, to look at it for more than two seconds before pulling the trigger. 

All things considered, then, the plea of ‘mistaken identity’ by no means exculpates the cuckoo-killer of this heinous crime. On the contrary, I thought it was a pretty lousy excuse. After an entire ‘Yes’ campaign based on how very misunderstood the hunting community really is… about its deep-rooted respect for the law, and the hunters’ full cognisance of their own responsibilities as armed men roaming the countryside… the least I expected was for a hunter who also appeared on a campaign billboard to actually take a good look at his first bird of the season before killing it. 

But no, by his own admission, he just shot the first bird he saw that ‘might have been’ a turtle dove... leaving a 50% chance that it ‘might have been’ a cuckoo… and incalculable odds that it ‘might have been’ any of the dozens of other birds that might also reasonably be mistaken for a dove… but what the heck? It’s a bird. BANG!

But people, people… a little perspective, please. The man shot a cuckoo. He didn’t molest a child, or commit a war crime. Nor did he wipe out the entire Cuculidae genus, either. Let’s not get too carried away by the rancour of having failed to put a stop to this lunacy when we had the chance. We did not fail in that objective because of this one hunter. So it makes no sense to vent half a nation’s anger and disappointment on him alone.

And besides: in a sense we should almost be grateful to him, too, for reminding us how justified our misgivings all along were. However you choose to interpret the incident – regrettable accident, or wilful, premeditated cuckoo-cide in the first degree – it still points towards the same negligent, ‘shoot-first-ask-questions-later’ attitude that has permeated this entire issue from the very beginning. ‘If it flies, it dies’, remember? And if it dies … well, it doesn’t really matter whether it was shot by mistake or on purpose. It all ends the same way: blood, lead and feathers.

Still, it remains the thing it is: a dead cuckoo, shot illegally in spring. Hardly anything new about that, either. It’s been happening each year for generations. And it’s also what the Maltese people voted for last Saturday. So next time you feel a knot in your throat at the plight of that single bird, and are about to take to the social media to pour out all your grief, anger and thirst for vengeance… just remember that there’s still the rest of this season to go, then every season after that for the foreseeable future… and we can predict from now how it’s all going to work out. 

BANG! Oops! Sorry… I could have sworn it was a common quail in the early morning light. But now that it’s dead at my feet, and the sun is up… I belatedly realise it was actually an entire family of storks. Odd, isn’t it? And as for that night heron I just hid under that rock… well, the sun got in my eyes. And what do you mean, flamingos look nothing like turtle doves? Are you blind? They’re both pink… in fact, ALL birds look like both turtle dove and quail, when viewed from a certain angle at a certain time of day… oh look, there’s a turtle dove right now… BANG!

And on it goes. So you’d better all get used to it, for your own sakes. As any psychiatrist will tell you, it is not humanly possible to sustain the sheer level of nationwide grief we all saw this week… each time a single bird is shot dead in Malta in spring. It’s like having an attack of emotive hysteria every time you drive over a pothole. Your heart won’t hold out. The long-term psychological consequences would be devastating.

It might, in a word, drive you cuckoo.

Which brings me to the original point about how very apt it is that the bird we all flagellated ourselves over this week happened to be a cuckoo. 

Exactly why this bird lent its name to a euphemism for insanity, I cannot say for certain. I suspect it has something to do with its call, which does (let’s face it) sound a little bonkers… in a Laurel and Hardy sort of way.

But this is terribly unfair on the poor cuckoo itself. Cuckoos are not ‘insane’ at all… quite the contrary: they display remarkable lucidity and calculating connivance, for a creature with a brain roughly the size of a toenail-cutting. 

Contrary to widespread perception, this bird does not live in a clock (nor, for that matter, in cloud cuckoo land). It lives in other bird’s nests. Specifically, it is reared, fed and protected – from the moment it hatches – by another, unrelated bird. A bird that was deceived by a stratagem so cunning, so gleefully murderous, so Machiavellian and so devilishly clever… that I’m almost afraid that to go any further would be to dampen your grief over the particular specimen that was shot this week.

The cuckoo is, in fact, an arch-villain… the Moriarty of avian crime. No vulture, no bird of prey, no Marabou stork nightmare, no owl and no devil-bird – no, not even the biggest bustard that ever lived – can quite match this flying fiend for sheer evil and (literally) brooding malice. For like all great criminal masterminds, the cuckoo preys on the credulity and good faith of other birds. But unlike most, it does not work alone. The treachery of the cuckoo lies in the careful premeditation of its (remarkably complex) plan, which perforce requires teamwork.  

‘Live in other bird’s nests’, did I say? No, the reality is much more sinister than that. Like a vampire, the female cuckoo surreptitiously enters the nest while its male partner is busy luring away the rightful owners (i.e., smaller birds, with smaller and more defenceless young). Once inside, the female cuckoo will lay a single egg onto an existing clutch, knowing full well that the fledgling cuckoo will murder all other occupants immediately upon hatching. 

Infanticide. Like the most nefarious villains of history and literature – Richard III (Shakespeare version), King Herod, my old maths teacher at school (who bored thousands of innocent children to death throughout the 1980s) – the cuckoo is a child-killer. And from the very first instance of its entire being, its perfidy extends to guile and deception also. 

Having coldly despatched the entire legitimate brood, the fledgling cuckoo will easily hoodwink the parent bird(s) into believing that it has not so much murdered, but rather ‘become’ all their pretty chickens in one fell swoop. And like the besotted parents they are, these unsuspecting victims will toil and labour tirelessly to give the foundling impostor chick the best possible start to life… while its real biological parents fly around freely, without a care in the world, blissfully untroubled by the bother and inconvenience of parenthood (until they fly over Malta, when it’s… BANG!)

So you can even add ‘sponging off the welfare state’ to the cuckoo’s growing list of crimes. And THAT, as we all know from the last Budget, is infinitely more odious than merely murdering the odd little infant every now and again.

There. Feel a little better about the dead cuckoo, now that you know the true nature of that cute feathered little thing whose corpse you all saw in the papers? Still feel the same resentment towards the hunter? If he was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you’d all be cheering by now. Well, he slew a creature infinitely more evil and maleficent than any member of the Undead. He slew a cuckoo.  And that’s one less child-killing, blood sucking, job-stealing ‘unknown father’ to make it to another bird’s nest this year, and con some other birdbrained parents into bringing up his murderous, illegitimate bastard for free. 

And look at you all. Weeping and wailing over the fallen villain; cursing and rebuking the man who finally put a stop to a dastardly career in crime and social abuse. 

And they call the cuckoo ‘cuckoo’…