Cuckoo

Timely, nutty, inspiring, subversive, maddening, secretive – that’s the cuckoo in life and in lore. Cynthia Chris’s book is as rangy as is the common cuckoo, who travels as much as 15,000 miles in migration each year of their short lives. More commonly known for their habit of laying eggs in another bird’s nest then shirking parental duties, cuckoos have spawned a wealth of jokes about cuckoldry in Shakespeare, Joyce, 1950s sci-fi and Musk-on-Zuckerberg insults. But it’s not all bad being cuckoo, nor are all cuckoos alike in their nesting habits, and Chris gives a thoughtful nod to all members of the Cuculiformes. However, when a bird inspires not only Aristophanes, but a clock, the two-tone sound of a doorbell, a breakfast cereal, fables in China and Bhutan, Ken Kesey and notes of Vivaldi and Lena Horne’s music, it’s worth mapping the threads they weave through the cultures they fly through as well as the dangers they face as climate change shifts the world around them. What would spring be without the cuckoo’s call? Achingly silent. I’m grateful to Cynthia Chris for her evocative study of fascinating and charismatic bird. - Elizabeth Bradfield, naturalist, author of Toward Antarctica and editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry
Taking in a range of stories from clockmaking to international travel and sexual shenanigans, this book contains all you ever wanted to know about cuckoos. Cynthia Chris has done us all a favour by detailing the fascinating lives of cuckoos throughout the world, with particular focus on the onomatopoeic European species, and has done it in a thorough and accessible way. - Chris Gibson, retired conservation specialist for Natural England

Cynthia Chris is professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is the author of Watching Wildlife and The Indecent Screen: Regulating Television in The Twenty-First Century.

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