Cuckoo!!!

I have today marvelled that the once familiar call of the Cuckoo cuculus canorus has returned to the woods near us for the first time for over fifteen years. If I am honest it was not until it became a rare sound that I became to value him as a favourite, a lost herald of spring, a missing wake-up caller that new life and new growth and hatching life again are with us. A bird of poets and of country dwellers...''This is the weather the cuckoo loves,and so do I; when showers betumble the chestnut spikes,and nestlings fly'' (Thomas Hardy b. 1840).

However, I can't help thinking that nature as life itself can be cruel and random. The cuckoo is in fact parasitic and, remember, lays it's eggs in another's nest for the host bird to hatch. When it does, the huge cuckoo chick often of monster size in comparison even to the foster mother, kicks out all the other small host chicks to a cold end and exhausts the foster mother with a voracious appetite to grow and fledge and well ..take, take take!! Substitute the host bird for traditional catholic Anglicans and the cuckoo for liberal Anglicans and the quota and I could soon begin to change my favour of the parasitic and endless sound of cuckoo, cuckoo cuckoo!! Perhaps it will become rare or even extinct one day, nature has a funny way of selection, not forgetting that all is for The Creator not the creatures to decide! To hear the call ....http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=022M-W1CDR0001463-0100V0.xml