Cuckoo

A cuckoo was calling insistently throughout this afternoon at Domgay, Llanymynech, where I was gardening and getting attacked by some rather nasty buzzy flies that wanted to eat me.  Hated the flies, loved the cuckoo - to begin with, anyway.  There did come a point at which I began to long for him to shut up!

It is some years since I last heard a cuckoo call in this area, though I've heard them elsewhere of course - most recently on platform 1 of Whitlock's End station, Shirley, while waiting for a train into Birmingham. So of course it was a delight to hear one today, and reassuring - there are still cuckoos around in this part of the world, despite the sharp fall in overall numbers of this iconic summer visitor.

We delight in the cuckoo's call, and he features in many a folk song, but of course cuckoos have a rather nasty life style. Laying eggs in other birds' nests allows the cuckoo to raise a much larger 'brood', potentially at least, than it might if it had to build a nest of its own; and it also allows the parent birds to leave for Africa much earlier than other summer migrants: "June, she'll change her tune / July, she will fly", as the song puts it. The cuckoo call may be a lovely sound to us, but it isn't to reed warblers, dunnocks and meadow pipits, three species commonly parasitised.

A friend told me the cuckoo is for him a powerful argument against God. How could a benign creator make something so horrible and so destructive of others? Leaving aside the simple fact that there are plenty of examples in nature that might seem to us worse and more evil than the cuckoo, I would still want to argue that in the cuckoo I find displayed some of the reason why I do believe in God, maybe at times rather against the odds.

First, I believe in God because I marvel at our human ability to perceive beauty in the cuckoo's call. Birdsong and bright flowers are not intrinsically beautiful - or at any rate they are not placed on earth in order to be beautiful to us; they are there to do a job. But we find them beautiful, and are inspired by them to compose great music, or to paint great pictures. I am amazed, not at beauty itself but at my ability, and yours, to perceive it.

Second, I believe in God because I recognise the unfairness and cruelty of the cuckoo's behaviour. The cuckoo doesn't - it just gets on with doing what cuckoos instinctively do. How does the cuckoo chick know it must eject the other eggs and chicks from the nest and take sole charge? And how does it know to fly south to warmer climes, long after its parents, whom it has never known, have left? I'm at a loss to understand instinct and how it works. But I know that for me to steal and cheat and supplant as the cuckoo does would be wrong, and, even though I recognise the cuckoo bears no guilt because it does not do what it does out of choice, I still find its behaviour revolting. I am amazed that I know what is right, and what is wrong.

None of this is a proof for God. And, for that matter, I do accept that not everyone has the same ability to perceive beauty, and history (not to mention my newspaper this morning) is littered with examples of human cruelty and brutality whose perpetrators seek to justify and even applaud. None the less, the cuckoo's call leads me not away from faith, but toward it.