In cloud cuckoo land

On a vivid yet bracing April morning, John Lewis- Stempel savours the increasingly rare privilege of hearing a cuckoo's evocative call echoing over the meadows and rejoices in this special herald of spring

- Illustration by Michael Frith

A BRIGHT cold morning in April and the church clock strikes 11. As the clanging of brass fades away, a cuckoo calls out from the greening wood on the hilltop. Then, the sound of silence. A vacuum, an interval in which I fear that, in a madness of ornithological desire, I have mistaken a cooing wood pigeon for the cu-cu-ing migrant bird. Yet then it comes, indubitably, that glorious, bass-tone woodwind cry. Cou-cou. And louder now. Echoing, echoing down through the trees and meadows until it fills the narrow valley. The cuckoo is icumen in. The world still turns.

The first cuckoo of spring was once an event requiring a letter to The Times and a day off for farm labourers, who retired with a barrel of celebratory beer to the spinney where the bird was heard. Such is the scarcity of Cuculus canorus in England nowadays that any cuckoo, whenever, is worth a missive and a mug in celebration. The bird is largely restricted to high ground, such as here in the western Marches. A pity. The distinctive diphone cuckoo-cuckoo seemed to emanate from every copse in lowland Herefordshire in the 1970s, when I was young and England was bird rich. My grandma taught me the country ditty: 'Cuckoo, cuckoo.../ What do you do?/In April, I open my bill.'