Cuckoo, Nightingale, Lark, Woodpecker and Other Musical Birds in Myth and Folklore

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.