The Truth : Nothing But The Truth
Amazing Grace – Part Twenty-Five
What Guidance Has The Cuckoo For Our World?
I hope you will forgive me for dedicating a whole chapter to the cuckoo’s behaviour. To my mind, it reveals a great deal about how our world’s old religions once went about establishing themselves, one after the other. The only thing every new belief system had to do was follow in the footsteps of already existing ones. This is what the pharma industry did in preparation for world’s present state, the plandemic. So here we go:
The sight of a little warbler or pipit feeding an enormous cuckoo fledgling, six times the size of its foster parent, has astonished human observers for centuries. How does the cuckoo get away with such outrageous behaviour? In fact, they need extraordinary trickery to get past host defences, for the hosts are on the lookout for cuckoo eggs and if they detect one, they puncture it and eject it from the nest.
Two favourite hosts in Britain are reed warblers in marshland and meadow pipits in moorland. Individual female cuckoos specialise on one host species and there are genetically distinct cuckoo races. Reed-warbler-specialist cuckoos lay a greenish spotted egg, just like those of reed warblers, while meadow-pipit-specialist cuckoos lay a brownish spotted egg, just like those of meadow pipits. Both these hosts reject eggs unlike their own, so the specialised cuckoo-egg mimicry is essential to fool them.
The female cuckoo also needs secrecy to succeed, because if the hosts see her at their nest they are alerted to inspect their clutch more closely. She glides down to the host nest from a hidden lookout perch, removes a host egg, lays her own in its place, and is off – all within a ten second visit. As she departs, she often gives a chuckle call, as if in triumph. This is perhaps the most remarkable trick of all. The chuckle is similar to the rapid call notes of a sparrow-hawk, and that diverts the hosts’ attention away from noticing changes in their clutch and towards their own safety instead. So the female cuckoo has the last laugh as she flies away.
Given that hosts are on the lookout for odd eggs, it seems strange that they accept a cuckoo chick that’s so different from their own. But the cuckoo chick has a special trick, too. Its loud and rapid begging calls sound like a whole brood of hungry host young, and this fools the foster parents into bringing as much food to a cuckoo chick as the would to a brood of their own.
If you think you’re a good birdwatcher, you’ve nothing on the female cuckoo. Perching motionless in a tree she will lay in wait, monitoring the nests of her potential victims. When the host is away feeding, the cuckoo strikes, silently swooping into the empty nest and gobbling down one of the host’s eggs so that her own, which she speedily lays, is offered better incubation. Her job done she zooms off, never to see her offspring again. The entire operation takes just ten seconds.
While this mimicry is fantastic, the real jaw-dropping moment comes when the chick is born. The cuckoo’s egg has a head start, requiring half-a-day’s less incubation than the host’s clutch, possibly due to the fact that newly laid cuckoo eggs contain partly developed embryos. The chick’s homicidal tendencies are just as developed. Within hours of hatching the blind and naked infant pushes any remaining eggs from the nest. If any other chicks have had the misfortune of having already hatched, they’re also pushed out and fall to their death.
Alone in the nest, the cuckoo now has the sole attention of its foster parents, who will dart around to feed it and that leaves them no time fir breeding again for the entire season. But even if the host had been hoodwinked into incubating a perfectly matched egg, surely they notice that their baby is twice their size? Early in his research, the investigator wondered if the chick’s immense proportions were the reason that the hosts were confused into feeding the chick, which eats about the same amount as four ravenous reed warblers. Yet when he replaced a cuckoo chick with a similarly sized blackbird, the reed warblers cut back on feeding. Then he twigged that while the mother cuckoo uses visual trickery, the baby uses aural.
‘The cuckoo chick has this amazing begging call,’ he says. ‘It sounds like a whole brood of hungry chicks. So we repeated the blackbird experiment, giving it a helping hand in the form of a little loudspeaker next to the nest. Every time the blackbird begged, we played the cuckoo begging call through the speaker.’ The effect was instantaneous; the reed warblers doubled their efforts to feed the chick.
As the chick gets older the intensity of its begging cry increases to make the hosts work harder, victims of what Darwin called ‘mistaken instinct’. The host is hard-wired to feed its hungry young and that’s why the con works. After nineteen days the cuckoo is literally bursting from its nest but will still be supported by its poor foster parents for a further two weeks, before abandoning them and heading in the direction of Africa.
With long, pointed wings, a long tail and barring underneath, the common cuckoo looks rather like a bird of prey. Only male cuckoos call ‘cuck-oo’. The bill is opened for the ‘cuck’ and closed to form a sound chamber for the ‘oo’. In flight, a cuckoo can often be confused with a sparrow-hawk with its long, pointed wings and grey-flecked under parts. It is thought that this mimicry may be a deliberate ruse to frighten a smaller bird off its nest, enabling the female to lay her own egg there.
While it may be easy to hear the call of the cuckoo, which carried over long distances, sightings are harder as they have a dull plumage and tend to hide within leafy cover. The male cuckoo is famous for its distinctive ‘koo-kooo’ call. It has been imitated by clockmakers around our world. The cuckoo clock, instead of the clock chiming, it makes a koo-kooo sound. Females have a bubbly chuckle sound that’s quite different from the male’s call.
Adult cuckoos move back to Africa as soon as the breeding season is over and that’s as early as the second half of June in southern England. Young cuckoos follow their parents to Africa several weeks later. The cuckoo spends nine months of the year in tropical Africa, where it has never been heard to call.
An old rhyme describes the Cuckoo’s way of calling, which in the United Kingdom goes like this:
In April I open my bill.
In May I sing night and day.
In June I change my tune.
In July far, far I fly.
In August away I must.
The common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) is a parasite with good PR. Despite deceiving other birds into hatching its eggs and raising its young, often at the expense of the cuckolded dupe’s legitimate offspring, the cuckoo seems to have emerged with its reputation not only intact but enhanced. William Shakespeare may have labelled the cuckoo call a ‘word of fear unpleasing to a married ear’, but people far and wide still willingly invite the sound into their homes to mark the hourly passing of time.
The female of the species is sneakier than the male. Whereas the proud and visible male cuckoo is responsible for that famous two-note call, it’s the female that does the actual dirty work of leaving usurpers in the homes of others. And her call is very different and rarely heard. But, as it turns out, it too is part of the parasitical package. It mimics the call of a hawk to distract nest-owners. The female has a rich bubbling chuckle, but the male’s call is the very familiar ‘cuckoo’. If you hear a Cuckoo calling, you will probably not see it until it stops and that’s when it flies away from its post.
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