Female cuckoo gliding down to lay her egg in a meadow pipit nest.
23 June 2014.
Another summer’s day, nearly 100 years ago. A vintage motorcar draws up gently at the edge of a small patch of heathland in the Wyre Forest, Worcestershire, England. A well-dressed gentleman emerges from the driver’s seat. He is wearing a flat tweed cap, tweed jacket and waistcoat with white shirt and tie, and his trousers are ‘plus-fours’, baggy knickerbockers with thick woollen socks up to his knees. Two other men get out, not quite so smart but still in clean white shirts (no tie) and jackets. They go round to the back of the car. An observer might expect them to bring out a hamper for a picnic. But what emerges from the luggage compartment is a surprise: a little hut, as tall as a man, made from bundles of twigs and heather, wrapped around a wicker frame.
The trio walk slowly across the heath, the gentleman in the lead, peering intently at the ground, with the two men behind, carrying the twig hut. Suddenly, the gentleman stops and he points ahead with his walking stick. The two men lower the hut to the ground. It is in two halves, and they remove the top. The gentleman steps inside and is handed a little stool. The top is replaced, and after a few moments a hand appears from a gap in the twig wall and gives a friendly wave. A few adjustments to make sure the hut is secure, then the two men retreat, leaving the smart gentleman hidden inside.
Edgar Chance getting into his hide on Pound Green Common in 1920, assisted by Simmonds father and son. Photo by Oliver G. Pike, The Truth About the Cuckoo, Edgar Chance.
This is Pound Green Common, and we have been watching the start of a 12-minute silent black-and-white film, The Cuckoo’s Secret, made in 1921. The smart gentleman is Edgar Chance, and the film celebrates his discovery of how the cuckoo lays her egg. This was one of the earliest wildlife films ever made, and it became the first of a celebrated series called ‘Secrets of Life’. It was shown to great acclaim at packed picture-houses across Britain and then in New York. The film is remarkable not only because it captures, for the very first time, a cuckoo laying in a host nest, but also because the cinematographer, Edward Hawkins, was a newsreel cameraman with no previous experience of wildlife filming. As Edgar Chance recalls in his 1940 book The Truth About the Cuckoo, when he met Hawkins for the first time at the train station:
Hawkins told me with some appreciation of his responsibility that he had never seen a cuckoo in his life. I put him at ease by replying that all that mattered was his ability faithfully to film what he would see, and promising him that he would see what no one else had ever seen.
As we watch the film, then, we can share Hawkins’s excitement as he in turn sat with his camera in the twiggy bird hide on Pound Green Common, just a few metres from a meadow pipit nest, which was on the ground by a tuft of grass. First, we see the female cuckoo laying an egg. What is most astonishing about this is the speed; she flies down to the pipit nest, lays her egg and departs, all within eight seconds. Chance had been watching the cuckoo from the edge of the Common and as soon as she flew towards the nest, he alerted Hawkins in the hide with the blast of a whistle to ensure the camera was running to catch this sequence.
Twelve days later, as the caption on the film explains, the cuckoo egg has hatched and the cuckoo chick, naked and blind, finds itself sharing the nest with two newly hatched pipit chicks and one unhatched pipit egg. Next, we see the mother pipit brooding. Suddenly, she is pushed aside and from beneath her the cuckoo chick emerges, shuffling backwards and struggling to balance the pipit egg in between its wing stumps in a little hollow in the middle of its back. The cuckoo backs up to the rim of the nest and pushes the egg overboard, with a final flick of its wings. The mother pipit looks on, apparently unconcerned, while the cuckoo sinks back into the nest.
After a while, the mother leaves on a foraging trip. While she is away, the cuckoo turns its attention to one of the young pipits. Now balancing this on its back, it works its way slowly up the side of the nest once more, pushing with its strong legs. It tries repeatedly to eject the pipit chick, but a writhing chick is harder to control than an egg and a minute later it is still heaving away as the parent pipit returns. She ignores the commotion on the edge of the nest and instead feeds the other pipit chick with a caterpillar. The cuckoo, apparently exhausted, slides back into the nest, together with its load, and the mother sits on all three chicks once more to keep them warm.
The mother leaves again. While she is away, the cuckoo chick, now recovered, quickly ejects the two pipits in turn, one by one. The pipit chicks writhe helplessly for a while on the ground just outside the nest, and when the parent pipit returns it feeds one of them with a caterpillar. But then it sits on the cuckoo chick inside the nest and pays no more attention to its own two young, still writhing just a few centimetres away over the rim. They slowly chill and are left to perish while the adult pipits tend the cuckoo, which has taken sole command of the nest. We watch the pipits working hard to feed the cuckoo, first as a growing nestling and then, after it leaves the nest, as an enormous fledgling.
These sequences must have both astonished and shocked viewers. The film captions perhaps convey the public reaction at the time: they refer to the cuckoo as ‘the feathered wrecker of homes’, who ‘shirks the duties of a mother bird’. What makes the film remarkable is the detective work necessary to catch the cuckoo laying her egg. Chance not only had to predict which pipit nest the cuckoo would choose, he had to know what day the female would lay, and at exactly what time, so he would be there to capture the drama in those crucial eight seconds. How did he do it?
Edgar Chance was a businessman, director of a company of glass manufacturers in Birmingham. But his passion was oology, the collecting and study of birds’ eggs. Before he began his studies on Pound Green Common, previous egg collectors had shown that the eggs of the common cuckoo are astonishingly variable. In Europe, most are speckled but the background colour varies: various shades of greyish-white, green or brown. The markings vary too: small speckles, large spots and even scribbles. Some have no markings at all and are plain white or an immaculate pale blue. No other bird in Europe has such variable eggs.
Whenever collectors found a cuckoo egg, they took the whole clutch to show the cuckoo egg alongside the host eggs. It had long been known (since at least the last half of the eighteenth century) that the cuckoo egg tended to resemble the host eggs, though it was a little larger. In Britain, for example, cuckoo eggs in reed warbler nests are greenish and spotted like those of the reed warbler. In meadow pipit nests, the cuckoo egg is darker, brown and speckled, matching the pipit’s own eggs. In pied wagtail nests, the cuckoo egg is much paler, a greyish-white and finely speckled, just like the wagtail’s eggs. In other parts of Europe the matches are even more impressive. Cuckoo eggs in redstart nests are immaculate pale blue, a perfect match for the host eggs, and in great reed warbler nests they have a pale green background with spots of various sizes and shades, from pale blue-grey to dark brown, which copy to perfection the markings on the host’s eggs.
Could a female cuckoo vary the colour of her egg depending on the host she chose? This seemed most unlikely. Although a female’s egg might vary a little depending on her diet, the variation in cuckoo eggs was surely too great to be in the repertoire of an individual female. In 1892, two German oologists, Eduard Baldamus and Eugene Rey, both collected series of eggs from individual females, laid in adjacent host nests in a restricted territory. Their collections showed that each female always laid exactly the same type of egg. Furthermore, they discovered that different females preferred different hosts; some might target reed warblers, for example, while others targeted meadow pipits. Occasionally they found that a female laid an egg in the nest of the ‘wrong’ host species, perhaps when a nest of her favourite host was not available. But she still laid exactly the same egg each time.
These pioneering studies by egg collectors showed, therefore, that the match between cuckoo and host egg must come about because female cuckoos with different egg types somehow managed to choose the host species for which their egg was a good match. The alternative possibility was that cuckoos simply laid eggs at random and only well-matched eggs survived for the egg collectors to record. It was already known that birds sometimes rejected a foreign egg placed in their nest. However, random egg laying followed by host rejection seemed an unlikely explanation for the match between cuckoo and host eggs, because many cuckoo eggs were collected soon after they were laid, and random laying would be extremely wasteful from the cuckoo’s point of view. In any case, Baldamus and Rey had shown that individual female cuckoos did not lay eggs randomly, but rather favoured one host species.
These observations suggested that the common cuckoo must be divided into several races, each specialising in a particular host species, and laying distinctive eggs that matched its host’s eggs: brown and spotted for meadow pipit specialist cuckoos, green and spotted for reed warbler specialists, plain blue for redstart specialists, and so on. In 1893, Alfred Newton called these cuckoo races gentes (gens in the singular), a Latin word denoting a clan of families descended from a common ancestor. We now know that there are genetic differences between the cuckoo races, so they are rather like subspecies of the common cuckoo.
Edgar Chance admired these previous studies by Eugene Rey and others, but what really fired his obsessive passion for collecting was when he heard that Rey had a record series of 20 eggs laid by a female cuckoo in one season, near Leipzig. (In fact, Chance had been misinformed; Rey’s series was of 17 eggs, still a tribute to the success of the parasitic lifestyle.) Chance was determined to beat this record. To be sure of collecting all a female cuckoo’s eggs in one season, however, he would have to follow her carefully to discover not only every host nest she chose, but exactly when laying occurred. He also knew of an egg collector’s trick which might entice a cuckoo into laying more eggs, so he could beat Rey.
There was another motivation for Chance’s study, a dispute that he wanted to settle once and for all. Some observers claimed that the female cuckoo first laid her egg on the ground and then inserted it into the host nest with her bill. These were the ‘beakers’. Others, the ‘regurgitators’, thought the cuckoo arrived at the host nest with her egg in her oesophagus, and then regurgitated it into the nest. There seemed to be good evidence for these possibilities: female cuckoos had indeed often been seen flying past with an egg in their bill, and some female cuckoos that had been shot had been found with an egg in their throats. Furthermore, some hosts, such as the wren, have a domed nest with a tiny hole for an entrance. Surely the female cuckoo could not lay directly into these nests. Eugene Rey, for example, was a ‘beaker’, citing a cuckoo egg found in the nest of a red-backed shrike that was smeared with clay as proof that the egg had first been on the ground. Chance was convinced both parties were wrong, and that the female cuckoo laid directly into the host nest, just like other birds. This was his second incentive to discover exactly when and where the cuckoo laid, so he could catch her in the act.
Pound Green Common was an isolated patch of undulating grassland and heather, about 400 × 600 metres, and bounded on three sides by woodland. It was a man-made common, cleared for grazing in the eighteenth century, which then provided ideal habitat for meadow pipits and other ground-nesting species – tree pipits, skylarks, yellowhammers and stonechats. It had a few scattered tall trees, perfect lookout posts for female cuckoos searching for host nests. Chance’s most detailed work on the common was during the five summers from 1918 to 1922. Together with his four assistants, O. R. Owen, P. B. Smyth and the two Simmondses, a local coal miner and his son, he began a regular routine of searching for host nests. By clever detective work from collecting cuckoo and host eggs, they slowly pieced together the remarkable story of how the cuckoo lays her eggs.
The first summer, 1918, Britain was still at war and it was possible to make only casual visits to the common. When Chance first visited, at the end of May, breeding had already been under way for a month. He soon discovered how hard it was to find nests in the dense vegetation. Pipit nests were on the ground and often tucked away out of sight in little hollows, under tufts of grass or clumps of heather, and even when the collie dog of the elder Simmonds flushed a sitting bird close by their feet, they often failed to find the nest. They often heard male cuckoos calling, ‘cuck-oo’, and also the bubbling cries of females, best described as a ‘water-bubbling chuckle’. On some days they saw a female glide down from a tree perch to the ground, but it was usually impossible to locate the exact spot she had landed. Despite these early frustrations, the team found eggs from two female cuckoos that summer. Both laid the brown eggs typical for cuckoos of the meadow pipit race, but each female’s eggs were distinguishable by slight differences in their ground shade and markings. One, ‘Cuckoo A’, laid her eggs on one side of the common, 10 eggs in the nests of meadow pipits and one in a skylark’s nest. The other, ‘Cuckoo B’, laid her eggs in an adjacent territory on the other side, just four eggs, all in meadow pipit nests.
Chance collected all these cuckoo and host eggs and to preserve them he blew out their contents by making a tiny hole at each end of the egg. By examining the embryos, he could determine the stage of incubation. In each parasitised clutch, cuckoo and host egg had about the same stage of development, so Chance concluded that the cuckoo must time the laying of her egg in each nest to coincide with the days the hosts laid. Meadow pipits usually lay a clutch of four or five eggs, one per day. So the cuckoo has only a short window of opportunity, just four or five days at each host nest. To parasitise 10 or more nests in a season, she must have to watch all the hosts carefully to get her timing right. In future, Chance determined to watch the cuckoos as well as search for host nests.
The next season was eagerly awaited. Meadow pipits were clearly the favoured host, but in the spring of 1919 there were only 10 pairs on the common, so Chance decided to give the cuckoos a helping hand. In early May, just before the cuckoos arrived, he collected all the pipit clutches that were already being incubated and so were too late for parasitism. These pairs immediately began to build new nests, and within seven or eight days they had begun a replacement clutch, so the result was more pipits at the right stage for the early cuckoo eggs. To Chance’s delight, the same two female cuckoos returned, recognisable by their characteristic eggs, and they laid in exactly the same, adjacent territories as the previous year. During this second season, 18 eggs were collected from Cuckoo A, all from meadow pipit nests, even though there were many skylarks, tree pipits and linnets nesting in her territory, showing convincingly that she was a host specialist. Only two eggs were found from Cuckoo B, both again in meadow pipit nests.
By checking nests daily, to determine exactly when the cuckoo egg was laid, and then again later to determine exactly when it hatched, Chance calculated that the cuckoo hatched after only 12 days’ incubation, compared with 13 days for the host eggs. Therefore, provided the female cuckoo timed the laying of her egg correctly, the shorter incubation time gave the cuckoo chick the chance to eject the host eggs before they hatched, likely to be an easier task than ejecting struggling host chicks.
Chance was now able to estimate the laying dates for the few cuckoo eggs that he had failed to find until after incubation had begun. The sequence from Cuckoo A, which he was sure were all the eggs that she had laid that summer, showed that she laid on alternate days. The first five were laid in this regular sequence from 18 to 26 May. Then there was a three-day gap. The next 13 were laid on alternate days from 30 May to 23 June.
Chance had, in fact, beaten Rey’s record of 17 eggs in a season by one, but his misinformation led him to believe that he was still three eggs short. So in the third season, 1920, he decided to increase the availability of pipit nests still further by ‘farming’ both parasitised and unparasitised clutches throughout the season to make sure there would always be a suitable nest available for the cuckoo whenever she needed one. If a pipit had an empty nest on the day a cuckoo was due to lay, Chance added an egg or two, from another pipit or skylark nest, to make the nest appear as if laying had begun. To his relief, Cuckoo A returned once more. This time, with Chance’s help, she laid a total of 21 eggs, 20 in meadow pipit nests and one in the nest of a tree pipit, and his ‘world record’ was secure.
This third season had revealed more about cuckoo behaviour, too. As Chance checked each host nest, he often flushed Cuckoo A from a nearby tree and realised that she was busy doing the same thing! So the easiest way to find host nests was simply to watch her. ‘By enlisting the cuckoo as a member of our band of observers,’ Chance wrote, ‘we could make her do much of the donkey work.’
By the end of May 1920, Cuckoo A had already laid 10 eggs. Chance knew she laid on alternate days, so by careful farming of clutches to restart nests in rotation, at two-day intervals, he could be fairly sure which nest she would choose. But still he had failed to witness the laying event itself. At first he assumed that the cuckoo would lay early in the morning, just as the pipits did. So he stayed out all night on the common to make sure he was at the host nest at dawn, but when he checked the nest he was surprised to find that the cuckoo had already laid her egg. Next time he got there even earlier. One cold and misty morning, he awoke at 3.45 a.m. to find a new cuckoo egg alongside a pipit egg, both cold and damp and clearly unattended during the night (pipits do not begin incubation until the clutch is complete, or nearly so). He suddenly realised his mistake: the cuckoo must have laid her egg the previous afternoon.
With the discovery of this final piece of the cuckoo’s timing puzzle, the team of observers now focused their attention on the female cuckoo every afternoon. At last they were able to watch her lay, most often between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Beforehand, she would remain motionless on a branch, hidden in a tree up to 100 metres from the host nest. This could be an agonising wait for Chance and his team; sometimes she sat there for 30 minutes, sometimes for two and a half hours. Then, when she was ready, she glided down to the nest, remained there for usually just 10 seconds or so, and left. When the observers checked the nest, they found one host egg missing and the cuckoo egg in its place. Incredibly, she had removed a host egg and laid her own all in just a few seconds. But still no one had seen exactly how she laid.
Cuckoo A returned again in 1921, and in this her fourth season, Chance was triumphant at last. He now knew the days the female would lay (every other day), could predict which nest she was likely to choose (one where the pipits were still laying), could limit the cuckoo’s choice (by farming pipit clutches so there was just one suitable nest available that day), and knew the time she would lay (late afternoon). So by placing hides close to the predicted host nest he was able to watch the cuckoo lay from just a few metres away.
This is what he saw. As soon as she landed by the nest, the female removed a host egg. Then, holding this in her bill, she sat briefly on the nest to lay her own. She then backed off and flew away, carrying the host egg. On landing on a nearby perch, she then swallowed the host egg whole. These observations solved two puzzles at once. The female laid her egg directly in the nest, just like other birds do. And the egg that previous observers had seen the female carry in her bill was a host egg, not the cuckoo’s egg. The beakers and regurgitators had got it wrong. We now know that direct laying is the normal procedure for common cuckoos with all their hosts. For those with domed nests, like wrens, the female simply clings to the nest, places her belly against the nest hole, and squirts the egg in.
It was during this fourth season that Edward Hawkins was hired to film the laying for the first time. He obtained the best sequences during the laying of the second, third, fourth, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth eggs, and the best approach glide of the cuckoo to the pipit nest with the laying of the seventh egg. It is remarkable that Chance was able to predict so well which nests would be chosen, so that hides could be placed correctly for Hawkins to catch so many layings. The result was an edited film that could show all the stages in wonderful detail.
In mid-June 1921, Chance stopped collecting completed host clutches. Without his help to make more nests available, Cuckoo A laid fewer eggs that summer, just 15 in total: 14 in meadow pipit nests and one in a tree pipit nest. This showed very neatly that a cuckoo’s output on the common was limited more by the availability of host nests than by food to form the eggs.
Cuckoo A’s fifth and final season in 1922 was, in Chance’s own words, ‘an outstanding and historic performance’. With human help restored, to make available as many host nests as possible, and including the additional trick of putting out extra artificial nests next to occupied ones, she achieved a total of 25 eggs that summer, all collected by Chance. All were laid in meadow pipit nests, and they involved just 11 pairs of pipits, some having their clutches farmed by Chance several times. Some of these layings were filmed from a hide by a second cameraman engaged by Chance, Oliver Pike, using what for the time was ‘ultra-rapid’ film, to illustrate the laying sequence. Guests, too, were invited to watch the egg laying. Chance records that ‘Mrs. Pike got very excited inside the hide, while watching the cuckoo lay, despite the fact that she had had considerable experience of bird-watching.’ However, not all shared such enthusiasm or patience, and some nodded off in the warmth of the hide during the crucial 10 seconds.
Chance published his discoveries in two books: The Cuckoo’s Secret in 1922 and then an expanded version in 1940, The Truth About the Cuckoo, which recorded the egg-laying exploits of five other cuckoos on the common, up to 1930. These five females were all meadow pipit specialists, just like Cuckoo A. Chance’s meticulous records, from all the cuckoos he followed, totalled 86 eggs: 71 laid in meadow pipit nests, eight in tree pipit nests, four in a yellowhammer nest, and one each in the nests of skylark, willow warbler and linnet. His books have black and white photographs by Oliver Pike, so we can see Cuckoo A in action: landing by the host nest, leaning in to pick out a host egg, sitting in the nest to lay, backing out, and then flying off with the host egg in her bill. Some of the stills taken from the cine film are small and blurry, and Chance recommends the reader to use a magnifying glass. But these are the remarkable first records of exactly how the cuckoo lays her eggs.
Cuckoo A parasitising a meadow pipit nest on Pound Green Common in 1922. First, she picks out one of the host’s eggs. Holding it in her beak, she then lays her own egg directly into the nest.
Cuckoo A then flies off with the host egg.
These were the first-ever photographs of a cuckoo laying her egg. Photos by Oliver G. Pike, The Truth About the Cuckoo, Edgar Chance.
Chapter 7 of The Truth About the Cuckoo records, in remarkable and loving detail, the laying of every egg from Cuckoo A’s record-breaking performance during the summer of 1922, from her first on 11 May to her twenty-fifth on 29 June. With just one extra day’s break after the second egg, she laid them on alternate days: May 11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, June 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 and 29. It is difficult to decide who is more deserving of our admiration: the cuckoo, for keeping track of so many host nests, so she could time the laying of each egg to coincide with the pipit’s own egg-laying period, or Chance and his team, for managing to keep up with her. His account of the laying of the sixth egg conveys all the thrills and frustrations of trying to predict which pipit nest the female would choose:
May 22: Present were the Rev. Allan Ellison, the Hon. Guy Charteris, Oliver Pike, the two Simmondses and myself. The expected nest was 3a, but there were other possibilities . . . At 11 a.m. the cuckoo was watching 6b . . . for thirty-five minutes we watched her sit motionless, then she flew away . . . from 2.15 to 2.45 we sheltered from a heavy thunderstorm in hides . . . We resumed our vigil at 2.45 . . . Ellison was posted fifteen yards from 3a nest and Pike in the sand-pit to watch 4a and 5 territories. Charteris, with either Simmonds or myself, was guarding the territories of 6a and b6 [sic], the nest of the latter not yet found. There was no sign or sound of the cuckoo, but exactly at 4 p.m. Ellison whistled, and on Pike’s advice I went over . . . only to realise Ellison had only seen the cuckoo leave the nest. My dear friend admitted having felt sleepy because of the sultry heat. Thus I experienced the annoyance caused by the failure of a privileged guest to rise to the occasion after I had stationed him in the most favourable position!
Chance was proud of his season’s record from Cuckoo A, though he admitted it was achieved largely as a result of his help by the continuous collection of clutches to ‘restart’ the pipits. He marvelled at the observation skills of the female cuckoo, who obviously had kept an eye on his nest manipulations throughout the summer, so she could take advantage of the extra laying opportunities he arranged for her. Surely nature, unguided, would never provide so many laying opportunities. Chance believed that his record would ‘never be equalled so long as cuckoos continue to lay’.
However, Chance underestimated the cuckoo’s cunning. He knew that cuckoos would sometimes eat whole clutches of host eggs that were too advanced for parasitism, but subsequent studies have shown that this is a regular strategy used by female cuckoos to restart the hosts. In a study from 1970 to 1981 of cuckoos parasitising marsh warblers, near Hamburg, Germany, Karsten Gärtner found that 30 per cent of host nests with completed clutches or young chicks were taken by female cuckoos. In another study of cuckoos parasitising reed warblers in France, cuckoos laid more than a quarter of their eggs in replacement nests following such predation. Only female cuckoos, not males, plunder host nests, so it is a strategy to increase the availability of host nests, not simply a hungry cuckoo looking for an easy meal.
Unwittingly, then, Chance had simply been doing what cuckoos normally do for themselves. The female cuckoo is not only a superb watcher of the host nests in her territory, she is an arch manipulator too, taking clutches to stagger host laying and so maximise her egg-laying opportunities throughout the season. In 1988, a cuckoo studied by Mike Bayliss in Oxfordshire, central England, equalled Cuckoo A’s record without human help. She parasitised a population of 36 pairs of reed warblers, laying 25 eggs in the season and parasitising 24 of the pairs, one pair twice.
Over her five seasons on Pound Green Common, Cuckoo A laid 90 eggs, all collected by Chance except for the few that hatched before he found them. Eighty-seven had been laid in meadow pipit nests, two in tree pipit nests and one in a skylark nest. They are now beautifully displayed in wooden cabinets in the Natural History Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire, with Chance’s neat labels and numbers on each egg in the sequence, a testament to his extraordinary obsession. Cuckoo A paid a price: her five long trips across the Sahara to her African winter quarters and back, and five summers’ work finding all those pipit nests, led to no genetic immortality. But the cuckoo’s laying secret, a mystery since the time of Aristotle, was a story told by her eggshells. Her memory endures in those lifeless jewels.
Edgar Chance died in 1955 at the age of 74, having amassed a collection of 25,000 bird eggs. Egg collecting from common birds, which included the cuckoo in those days, was not illegal, but Chance collected the eggs of rare, protected species too. In April 1926 he was fined 13 pounds and 10 shillings for unlawfully taking crossbill eggs, and was expelled from the British Ornithologists’ Union. He dedicated his second cuckoo book to his daughter, Ann Augusta Cardamine, named after lady’s smock, Cardamine pratensis, also called the cuckooflower because its delicate, pale pink flowers first bloom towards the end of April, at about the time the cuckoo returns to Britain to breed.
In June 2008 I made a pilgrimage to Pound Green Common. Some of the landmarks in Chance’s 1921 film were still clear: a little hut and the rough track where he drove in with his hide on the back of his motorcar. But, with a decline in sheep grazing, the common had now become overgrown with bracken, silver birch and oak scrub. There were no meadow pipits, just a lone tree pipit singing for a mate from the top of a birch tree.
I sat on the edge of the common and imagined Edgar Chance working here 90 years ago in his tweed suit and tie. His careful observations and his brilliant solving, piece by piece, of the
cuckoo’s secret surely must rank as one of the greatest feats in field ornithology. My mind wandered and then, from the distant pine plantation, I thought I heard a male cuckoo call, just a few times and very faint. I stood, cupped my hands and blew a loud reply: ‘cuck-oo, cuck-oo’. All was silent and I sat down again. Perhaps I had been fooled by a pilgrim’s daydreams. A minute later, however, a cuckoo suddenly appeared, flying fast and low towards me, just over my head. I called again and he circled the common twice, calling ‘cuck-oo’ and making a low, guttural ‘kwow-wow-wow’, as if in annoyance at the intrusion. Then he perched at the top of a tall birch tree, with his tail held high and his wings drooped, twisting from side to side and calling loudly, without pausing, ‘cuck-oo, cuck-oo’. I let him call there, unanswered, for a few minutes. Then, apparently satisfied that the intruder had been beaten off, he flew back to the distant plantation.
Members of the local Commoners’ Association plan to clear the bracken and birches, and they hope that with restoration of the lowland heath, with its grassland and heather, both meadow pipits and cuckoos will return. But that day, once the cuckoo had left, I sat alone on a silent common, saluting the memory of Edgar Chance.