The month of May is one of the most delightful times of year in rural Ireland a time when the countryside seamlessly slips from spring into summer. The hawthorns blossom in a perfusion of white along the hedgerows, the gorse banks shimmer yellows and gold in the cool, morning light and overhead, a resident buzzards soar and screeches above the Scots pines where their eyries are filled with downy hatchlings. 

 After more than thirty years living in a remote corner of eastern Ireland, I can predict with reasonable accuracy that, during the first week in May, I will hear that other harbinger of the Irish spring, the cuckoo, sing out its onomatopoeic song.  

An Irish country tale that is indicative of the many simplistic explanations of the natural world, is the one that attributes metamorphisms to the cuckoo.   Due to the bird’s striking resemblance to members of the raptor family, particularly the sparrow hawk or kestrel, and the fact that it appears here annually at the same time of each year, Irish country folklore, right up until the middle of the eighteenth century, decreed that the cuckoo was really a bird of prey.  Tradition dictated that the hawks changed into cuckoos for the duration of the summer, only to metamorphosis again in the autumn.  I expect the logic behind this simplistic explanation was the cuckoo’s sudden appearance, allied to the localised migration of the smaller, resident birds of prey that move upland to their summer breeding territory around this time.

I heard the male cuckoo call from his vantage point on the ancient, tree lined "Rath" or hill fort that overlooks my home on the first Saturday in May.  Walking the hedge in its direction with Labrador at heel and my neighbour’s eight-year-old son keeping apace with me, we successfully flushed the bird from its vantage point in the branches of a beech.  Its resemblance to a bird of prey was indeed striking, a fact that had not escaped my young companion.

“My granny taught me a song about the cuckoo,” he chirped . 

“Want to hear it?”

 Of course I did, was my reply.

"The cuckoo comes in April,

It sings its song in May:

In the middle of June it whistles a tune,

And in July it flies away.”

I smiled as I reflected that my late grandmother taught me the same rhyme when I was about his age as this little fellow.  Thankfully, the cycle continues!