Catherine Drea: 'I’m still listening for the cuckoo. No sign yet'

I didn’t realise that I was waiting for the cuckoo to return until I saw, ‘That they may face the rising sun’, recently. 

A beautiful film, based on the book by John McGahern, one of the characters points out the cuckoo’s call to the main character. 

Now the summer is here, he proclaims.

So I’m listening out, but I haven’t heard one yet. 

Instead I am celebrating the return of the house martins who also go as far as Africa for the winter and then inexplicably return to the same nest they had last year here in rural Waterford.

House martins are like swallows and behave in similar ways. 

Not only do they travel over and back thousands of miles, they, unlike the cuckoo, raise and feed their own young in the process. They are now happily ensconced under the eaves of the house.

That cuckoo though is a bit of a rake. 

When they finally arrive in Ireland, and I know some are here already, they will find an unsuspecting meadow pipit and hassle that tiny bird out of her nest by pretending to be a bird of prey.

They then sneak into the nest, lay their enormous eggs for the small bird to hatch and raise, and do a bunk. 

Nature is nature as they say, but this carry-on wouldn’t endear you to the cuckoo, now would it?

But the cuckoo’s call is a top class act. 

Many people have never heard it, except in a mechanical cuckoo clock, but it is probably one of the most iconic and charming of all. 

For a few weeks I will hear it and then long before the other migrating birds depart, sometime in July the cuckoo will fly away again.

For the first time this year a study of the migration of the Irish based cuckoos was undertaken by The National Parks and Wildlife Service. 

To everyone’s amazement the ringed birds which were first identified in Killarney were traced to the Congo. 

After a few months there, they travelled back through Morocco, Cameroon, Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the Western Sahara, before heading for Kerry.

If I don’t hear the cuckoo this year it might be because the little bird whose nest they invade is now an endangered species.

Unlike the habit of the house martins to return to the same nest the cuckoo has no such loyalty. 

Like many other species cuckoos and their hosts the meadow pipits will become more and more scarce.

‘That they may face the rising sun’, won Best Irish Film this year at the IFTA’s. 

Set in the 1980’s, you could rely on the return of the cuckoo in those days. The film is mesmerising, with a depiction of the complexity of life in rural Ireland. 

We tend to make too many assumptions about what life is like down a long lane. We simplify communities that are in fact complex and diverse into culchie sterotypes.

This is one of the things that I loved so much about the film and of course the wonderful book. 

Each character has their own story and every interaction reveals who they are and how they think and feel. 

It is slow and quiet and to be fair the cinema was half empty when I saw it, but if this sounds up your alley I would highly recommend that you go to see it.

The film paints a picture of landscape through the seasons and how this impacts on those of us living in wilder places. 

Not only are we listening for the cuckoo, we are living through small changes everyday. 

We are noticing what is lost and what is vulnerable in nature. 

We are probably too quiet about what is being lost, but that’s also the nature of rural life, it is intensely lived and totally absorbing.

At the moment we are welcoming Spring and all it brings, counting the wildflowers that still return every year. 

So far I have seen primroses, speedwell, native bluebells, stitchwort, vetch, the white blossom of hawthorn also known as the sceach and blackthorn.

The scents are magical but the vulnerability is very real.

Everything is changing. ‘That they may face the rising sun’, reminds me of those years during the 1970’s and 1980’s when many of us first moved from urban childhoods to the romance of rural living.

Everything was rich in its simplicity especially through rose tinted glasses.

I’m not sure now that the rural way of life is sustainable into the future except for farmers, growers and communities living in villages. Group living with public transport will have to be the way of the future. 

The privilege of living close to nature in glorious isolation may be coming to an end except as a leisure activity.

There’s a tender sequence in the film which portrays the rituals of the Irish wake and the beauty of that tradition. 

There is so much about our culture that can be celebrated and passed on to the next generations. 

But unless they see us caring and holding these traditions as precious, they will die out.

I’m still listening for the cuckoo. No sign yet, but the joy of looking up into trees and walking in the forest has instead led me to an encounter with some red squirrels. So all is not in vain!