Sounds of birds, most especially, were used to mark both the hours of the day and the seasons. The cuckoo is the bird of spring, while the lark sings in the early morning and the nightingale during the night. This gave them significance at once practical and poetic, as is illustrated by this exchange in Williams Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, taking place after a night of love.

Until the modern period, when clocks became relatively inexpensive and accurate, the songs of birds were constantly used to signal the time of day and night. The association of birdsong with hours is why many of the first affordable clocks used a mechanical cuckoo to announce the hours.

The song of the cuckoo traditionally announces the beginning of the growing season with an outpouring of exuberant energy. Farmers understood it as a signal to begin planting, but spring is above all the season of love. Through most of history, apart from the high Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, amorous passion has been regarded with suspicion, and that may also be said of the cuckoo. Its song has traditionally been a good omen for those who planned to marry but a warning of possible adultery for those already wedded. Pliny the Elder suggested that hawks transformed themselves into cuckoos, since the hawks seemed to vanish at about the same time as cuckoos became numerous. He observed, however, that hawks would eat cuckoos if they did meet. The idea reflected the bird’s reputation for treachery, since, as Pliny put it, “the cuckoo is the only one of all the birds that is killed by its own kind” (book 10, section 21). This superstition has continued into the twentieth century in parts of Europe.

According to one myth, Zeus first made love to Hera after he had moved her to pity by appearing in the form of a disheveled little cuckoo. The bird was one of Hera’s attributes and adorned her scepter. Indian poets knew the cuckoo as the “ravisher of the heart” (Gubernatis, vol. 1, p. 226), and the god Indra also assumed the form of a cuckoo for the purpose of seduction.

The idea that the cuckoo is an adulterer has at least some distorted basis in observation, since the European cuckoo will lay its eggs in the nest of another bird. The egg containing the young cuckoo will generally hatch first, and the fledgling will push the other eggs from the nest. Pliny explained this by saying that all other birds so hated the cuckoo that it would not dare make a nest, for that would be vulnerable to attack. The only way the cuckoo could procreate would be by concealing the identity of its offspring. The use of the word cuckold for a man whose wife is unfaithful goes back to The Owl and the Nightingale, a poetic dialogue on love and marriage written in England around the end of the twelfth century. In an era when marrying for love was still a somewhat revolutionary idea, the cuckoo increasingly came to represent sexual energy, while the nightingale was more romantic.

Although the cuckoo of literature is masculine, the nightingale is usually female in Western culture, and people have found her song less exuberant than sweet and sad. Her tragedy, as told by Appollodorus, began as Procne, a princess of Athens, married King Tereus of Thrace. They had a son named Itys. Tereus raped Philomela, his wife’s sister, and then cut out her tongue so she could not reveal his crime. Philomela wove characters telling her story into a robe and gave it to Procne, who then killed Itys, boiled him, and served him up to his father, Tereus, in revenge. When the king realized what had happened, he set out in pursuit of the two sisters. The women prayed to the gods, who then turned Procne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe. Latin authors, however, confused the two sisters and called the nightingale Philomela, a name later used by poets throughout Europe, perhaps because the song of a nightingale seemed to belong less to a killer than to an innocent victim. According to Pliny the Elder, the nightingale’s song was so beloved in Rome that caged nightingales there commanded the sort of prices paid for slaves.

In The Owl and the Nightingale, the songster becomes an advocate for courtly love and the owl accuses her of promoting licentiousness.

In traditions of the Near East, the nightingale is masculine and in love with the rose, a tragic passion incapable of consummation, but the Islamic world shared Western ambivalence about romantic passions. In The Conference of Birds, written by Sufi poet Farid Ud-Din Attar in Persia around the end of the twelfth century, the hoopoe summoned the birds to a pilgrimage to their king, the Simorgh. The nightingale responded that the rose flowered only for him and he could not leave her for a single day. The hoopoe then replied that the love of the rose was a superficial illusion, and the rose really mocked the nightingale by fading in a day.

In the tenth-century Islamic fable The Island of Animals, however, the nightingale proved to be the most eloquent and sensible of the an-imals. He surpassed even such fine speakers as the jackal and the bee, as the beasts, claiming mistreatment, brought suit against people before the king of Djinn. When a man from Mecca and Modena argued that human beings were especially favored by God, the nightingale carried the day by replying that humans therefore had special responsibility not to abuse other creatures.

In Russia, by contrast, nightingales were often associated with witchcraft. There was a great demand for caged nightingales to sing in the homes of aristocrats and wealthy merchants. Peasants hired to capture the birds would have to wander about the woods at night following the birds’ sounds, and they often feared becoming victims of enchantment. In Russian folklore, Nightingale was a monstrous brigand who was half bird, nested in oak trees, laid in wait for travelers on the road to Kiev, and could whistle up a wind strong enough to kill human beings.

The lark begins to sing early in the morning before the sun has even risen, and so it has been associated with beginnings. In The Birds by the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, the lark boasts that it is older than not only the gods but also the very earth itself, an idea perhaps inspired by the lark’s ability to sing in flight. When the lark’s father died, there was no ground in which to bury him, so the lark had to bury its daddy in its head.

As is true with so many other things, people tend not to appreciate animals until they begin to disappear. As Europe industrialized and birds became less common, Romantic poets of the nineteenth century celebrated birdsongs with perhaps unprecedented intensity. The singing of birds represented a sort of poetic inspiration that was utterly natural and spontaneous. Among the most famous lyrics of the period were “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats and “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which the poets long to enter the world of joy that could inspire the songs of a bird. Hans Christian Andersen celebrated the beauty of nature over the creations of humankind in “The Emperor’s Nightingale,” a fairy tale about a mechanical bird that fails to sing as sweetly as a bird in the wild.

As the twentieth century progressed, writers increasingly thought references to nightingales or larks as an outmoded poetic contrivance. The woodpecker is not so much a singer as a musician, but its sound announces the start of the rainy season in many cultures. The sound of a woodpecker knocking its beak against a tree resembles martial drumming and resonates loudly through the forest. The woodpecker was sacred to Ares, the Greek god of war. Romulus and Remus, the legendary twins who founded Rome, were suckled by a wolf and fed by a woodpecker. Ovid in his Metamorphoses told of the witch Circe, who changed a young man named Picus, son of the Roman god Saturn, into a woodpecker after he had refused her advances. Jacob Grimm and other scholars derived Beowulf, the name of the Anglo-Saxon epic hero, from “bee-wolf,” meaning woodpecker, though that etymology is not generally accepted. Seen more as a fighter than a lover, the woodpecker has never been terribly popular, yet it may do better than songbirds in the raucous popular culture of the latter twentieth century. One of the most popular cartoon characters has been the violent and frequently amoral trickster Woody Woodpecker.