WITH DON KNOWLER

Holding the tiny cuckoo in my hand, its warm body nestled in my giant palm, I regretted all the nasty things I had said about cuckoos over the years.

I had called them the sociopaths of the animal kingdom, loners preying on industrious doting parents.

The cuckoo modus operandi is well known, of course. Instead of rearing young themselves, a female merely deposits her eggs in the nest of a carefully selected host species.

The cuckoo egg hatches and the cuckoo chick – larger and growing more rapidly than its “siblings” – simply ousts them from the nest, or even suffocates them under its body.

For me, the magic of spring – of hope and rejuvenation after the dormant, often cruel Tasmanian winter – is tinged with a little melancholy when amid the optimistic twittering of other songbirds I hear the repetitive, far-carrying call of the four cuckoos that visit Tasmania in the breeding season. These are the pallid, fan-tailed, shining bronze (pictured) and Horsfield’s bronze-cuckoos.

I ask what misery and disruption they will wreak and it is confirmed a few months later when I see robins and honeyeaters struggling to feed rapacious, greedy “offspring”.

The bird I had in my hand was a shining bronze cuckoo. Although I see and hear shining bronze-cuckoos all the time, I didn’t realise how small and fragile they were. And here was this little bird – about the size of a grey fantail – seeking safety and security in my hand. The bird had been injured, I think, from hitting a wire fence in the Waterworks Reserve while under attack from brown thornbills who had twigged the cuckoo’s antisocial intent. The cuckoo, dazed and struggling to move, looked to me for protection, clearly aware the thornbills were giving me a wide berth.

The cuckoo had been lying on its back in the grass. When I placed him on a strand of wire forming the fence, he seemed to perk up. I gave the thornbills one last shoo and set off for home.

Although I might have rescued the cuckoo at this point, my loyalties remained firmly with the thornbills. I couldn’t stop thinking, however, of this beautiful little bird in emerald-green livery with a bronze head, narrow stripes across its grey breast, and the fate that would befall it if other, bigger birds joined in the attack.

I returned, chased off the thornbills again and reached out my hand. It eagerly grabbed a finger. The cuckoo was now placed in a tightly foliaged grevillea.

Next day when I returned, the cuckoo was gone. It was off, no doubt, to resume its seemingly mean-spirited business, but how could I feel antipathy towards a tiny bird merely carrying out the business that Mother Nature demanded of it? Contact Don at donaldknowler.com