Stormborne Cuckoo

A few weeks ago, I walked out into the front yard after a night of storms looking to check on the flowers, the shrubs, the state of the local yardworld, you know, after a night of thunder and bright lights. The tall Coreopsis, the Cut leaved Rudbeckia leaned and splayed after the pounding rains. I would not forgo the world of storms in my life. They are a necessity really. Who needs just nocturnal peacefulness all the time?

And standing on my sidewalk, looking up into the oaks, the ones overhead that I know so well I could give them first names, I heard a sound like a treefrog: a burble, a small rattling purr. And I looked over to my right, hoping to find another small frog in a life of frogs and there was a bedraggled lumpen thing on my barkfield, something huddled on my stepping stones. And I reached down, as it made its small sad sound again, and I knew as I held it that it was a fledgling cuckoo. Despite never having seen a fledgling cuckoo in my woodland wandering life. It was blown somehow away from its perch, its parents, all the possible branching cuckoo futures that now seemed far less than possible, that seemed stolen by the wind and the night. She did not struggle in my hands. She was mostly beak and soggy fluff and two dark waiting eyes. She may have been surrendering to her sundered death. She had lost, she thought, all the altitude she ever had. Instead, I carried her in to my wife. Who put her hands upon both her cheeks and looked at the bird like she suddenly realized once again the world is just the world. She wrapped it in a towel and sat with it in her lap.

The Yellow-billed Cuckoo has been a bird with me since before the fated day at age 11 when I strapped on binoculars and wandered out to find birds on my own. I knew this bird and its call from my Grandmother on my mother’s side pointing it out. Calling it, as many of her generation did, a rain crow. And Yellow-bills don’t really sing. They cuk-cuk and cowp their way through all my summers in Arkansas. When we were away from them (in Alaska, Montana) I missed the sound. As a sonically attuned bird person I note them: these Rain Crows. Though it reportedly does not call anymore often before rain than at any other time. It was a pleasant mythology. And once on my anniversary in north Arkansas the car ahead of me had dashed a cuckoo into the air that I stopped to examine and then watched die in my wife’s lap many years ago. So the cuckoo had been with me, and sharply, for a long time.

This youngster sheltered in its cotton burrow in my wife’s lap as I pondered where we were going to put it. It made no more frog noises. She handed it off to me and went to find some soft banana to see if this young bird would gape and eat. Astoundingly, it took some banana from a white plastic spoon. And it looked less bedraggled already though far short of regal. I decided the large Parrot cage I had in the building might help us out. Though it needed a re-examination to verify its construction and barring were appropriate. It was also eight-foot-tall and made of metal. Requiring some real wrestling into the back of the pickup and transfer up the front sidewalk through the big double doors (after failing to bring it through the garage door.) I never owned a parrot or lovebird or any of the world’s lovely finches. But years ago I ordered this cage and assembled it thinking I was on the cusp of bird ownership of one kind or another. I could never bring myself to lock one up inside this gray cage for life.

It had water dishes and food dishes. Four or five entry doors, a spiral rope perch dangling from the inside peak, fake branching limb perches. The cuckoo took right to it. Anywhere, I suppose, being a step up from a night of pounding rain and cold shivering on the ground. Her wings looked well developed and had the reddish tinge of the Yellow-billed already. Her tail was, well, not up to official cuckoo standards, short and irregularly indented. Though it defied actual enumeration of any feather count, I assumed it was growing. Expanding from the roots somehow. The cage now sat in our main living area: cats, dogs, television and all. The next question being, of course, foodstuffs. She would not be stalking bananas in our oaks. So, despite the new flavor on her palette, we needed more. And we have chickens, so we had mealworms in dried form. We started soaking a selection of them in warm water. Since this cuckoo wasn’t going to be drinking from a water bowl, she would be getting all her liquids in her foods. We also have a composting container outside affectionately known as the Beetle Bucket. Though the larvae inside are likely more fly than beetle in some proportion I am not willing to investigate further. My wife however launched right out to the bucket almost immediately bearing tweezers and came back looking a bit shaken but carrying a whirling small plastic container of larvae of some active type. And we soak some cat food nuggets of small size. This seems like the best starter feed array.

Tweezers substitute for mom and dad’s bird beaks and she readily flaps and gapes for anything in the tweezers. Birds certainly don’t chew or seem to taste. Just in and down the hatch like a weightlifter or a whale. In between times she makes a chuckle bouncing noise. Not something I have heard from a wild cuckoo but reminiscent anyway. Sometimes she does this sound every five to ten seconds. And it is a pleasant enough noise. We thought we might feed her five times a day but it becomes clear that she is willing to eat every hour. Four or five wet mealworms or three or four cat food chunks. She swallows the whole mobile larvae deftly though she or I sometimes drop them. We learn to line the bottom of the drop zone with paper towels making retrieval easier for the errant larvae or worms. Whoever walks by or gets tired of the chuckling feeds her. The food array is all in the kitchen on the island. The lively larvae in sealed containers with small airholes. I do eventually have to face my own trips out to the beetle bucket and probing tweezer runs down into the rotting potatoes and unidentifiable other rotting stuff. We seem to be rich enough with crawling things. Though I would not want to feed three cuckoo chicks. Lord.

We name her Chuckles though we strongly considered Bottomless Pit. And at night, lights out, she is quiet and alone except for our wandering Siamese cat Oliver who seems oddly uninterested in her, though he has killed errant wrens before who fluttered into the house. And he lives for a lizard and dreams of taking down a squirrel. Chuckles grows fast and smooths out into a more streamlined form. The tail looks longer and more cuckooish. She begins to make noises that resemble the cuk cuks of adult birds. She never, never refuses food. Poops abundantly. And decides that the rope spiral in the center of the cage at the very top is her best point of view. I arrange the branching perches so she can quickly run down to the eating place near one of the higher doors. She begins to flutter about. And if I place my capped face near any wall she flies to it.

After a few days we begin to feed her from the surface of oak leaves harvested from outside. At first this confuses her but she begins to target after some time. This involves many dropped food items. Eventually she is snatching the larvae or worms off the surface like a champion. And I comb my oaks and hickories looking for wild caterpillars. This is the essential cuckoo food. Though they do apparently eat cicadas and katydids. They are one of the very few birds who will eat bagworms. Which must be truly nasty tasting. And despite the nice summer date, I can’t buy a bagworm anywhere on my land. Supposedly, after the cuckoos arrive in spring, they sometimes hold off on nesting until the bagworms and dogday cicadas are numerous. This, unfortunately, was a bad bagworm year from my perspective.

She appears quickly capable of short flights. Which are not easily accomplished in the big cage. She goes from wall to wall and back to the rope and perches. Occasionally I rescue her dangling by one foot from one perch or another. Just hanging there looking puzzled about how things are going since the night of the storm. I search daily on my rounds outside for caterpillars and finally I discover some Sawfly cats eating one of my sumacs in abundance. I feed these to her on leaves and let some free in her cage. These bright yellow cats she hits like a professional cat eater. And then my wife has the idea of cutting a small oak or hickory and putting it in the laundry room in a Christmas tree stand. I am skeptical. Perhaps even discouraging. But while she is gone on a grocery run, I take the chainsaw and find a nice eight-foot sapling and haul it into the laundry room and pin it standing up. I put water in its base bowl. Twisting the three support screws in place, I find the white oak just scrapes the ceiling. I wait until my wife is home to admire it, then I carefully grab the caged cuckoo and put it in the tree. It seems to have an immediate understanding that this, truly, is where it belongs. I put cats and larvae all over the thing and feed her some more directly. When I come back, she has worked her way onto the highest oak perch. And amazingly, just that quickly, her fear response has come into play. When I open the door and walk into the laundry room, she tries to escape in one direction or the other. Perches on the wiring box, up on the laundry rack. I have to chase her down and place her back into the small home tree to encourage her to eat again from branches or leaves. It is a bit hurtful that I am no longer the mothering face of salvation but it is what one wants in a wild cuckoo.

After just a few more of these sad chases in the bird room, I understand it is likely time to let her out into the woods. I decide to put her over by my swamp. Though I am hyperaware of what a death-dealing world it is out there. Barred Owls and Red-shouldered Hawks nest on my ten acres every year. I hear them every day even in July. At least she does now look like a miniature cuckoo. And she has some flight skills that are rudimentary but must be rapidly advancing. Her tail is more tail-like. She has more than doubled in size in just nine days. I decide to release her the next morning. And I find I dread it like a dental visit. At lights out she is once again in the top of our small oak.

I am maudlin the next day, going in to feed her everything we have for the last time. She sits atop my finger giving me the side eye, the cuckoo look. We have a small transfer cage. She grasps the perch in there quietly and rides like she understands what is happening. My wife says goodbye and I walk the road to the swampside, listening for other cuckoos. I bring the camera. And after some silent staring through the cage I lift her out and place her on the low branch of a young hickory. She looks around immediately once again with that look that says ‘at last, I am here.’ She gazes upward and quickly starts going up the branch ladder. Then flutters over to a nearby cedar moving even higher. She is still going up when I walk away with the very empty cage.

Yellow billed Cuckoos, like most of our eastern forest birds, have been steadily declining by all of our measuring methods in the last 50 to 100 years. Internet estimates of the world population are about 9 million. There are reportedly 35% or so fewer now than fifty years ago in my childhood. The western US populations are considered endangered. In the eighties, California was estimated to have in the range of 30 nesting pairs. Down from 15 thousand a hundred years ago. In my Arkansas woods I have never noted their absence. From my Grandmother pointing them out before she herself was gone until yesterday, I have felt they are with us: here and safe.

I do know that in five or six weeks from the time I set her in that hickory, she, this particular bird, needs to fly to South America. Perhaps I should have shown her a map or a star chart. But I think it is inherent bird magic that awakens her one morning and pulls her down the globe: Mexico, Panama, Venezuela. Cuckoos are nocturnal migrants. How they apportion their night flights and sleeping and eating on the way, I don’t know. But just growing in a cage she ate like a linebacker. What stores it must take to fly to Argentina? The magic it must take for DNA in a bird to say suddenly ‘I must away to Paraguay.’ And then she must arrive in a landscape of oddities and new dangers. Spectral bats that snatch sleeping birds from their roosts, a list of bird-eating hawks that makes the Amazon look like certain death for anything that moves too much in the understory. Though it is a place that must just be ripped with caterpillars up high. And exotic tasty katydids. Insects I can’t even name. Foodstuffs that make my oaks look like spent larders.

I went back the day after her release and stood beneath the same trees. And I could hear the faint chuckle sound up high above me. I could not see her. She has underbelly sky camo. But it could only have been her. And I walked over there prepared to find fallen cuckoo bones or a puff of feathers. I told myself I would not tell my wife if I found evidence she had not made it through even one night without us. I lacked confidence, I know, in a six-ounce powerhouse. And I wished sometimes that I had put a small gold ring on her ankle (though I lacked the tools and skills), so that I could watch for that in the spring next year when the cuckoos return. I could check every arriving bird. As it is, I suppose, I will think each one I see here in these ten acres is her. I will proclaim her back and safe repeatedly and more hopeful than I usually am. But surely cuckoos can live ten years despite the bats and hurricanes and Panamanian skyscrapers? They can miss the mouths of Bicolored Hawks and come back and make more cuckoos several years in a row. I will try to stay hopeful. It is a task I am poor at. But if she could only make a cuckoo or two right here where she fell into our lives briefly, that would be enough.

Anyway, good luck, Miss 9 million and one.

        HR