The cuckoo in the nest
• An estimated 15,000 pairs of Eurasian cuckoos breed across Britain each year. The great spotted cuckoo is an uncommon and coveted sighting and the yellow-billed cuckoo is an even rarer vagrant
• Cuckoo behaviour is often moralised in literature. Shakespeare wrote in King Lear that ‘The hedge-sparrow [dunnock] fed the cuckoo so long, that it’s had it head bit off by it young’ and Ted Hughes warns that the first call of spring ‘sets the diary trembling’
• The more sinister aspects of brood parasitisation are explored in John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, in which all the women in one village become pregnant by alien forces. A new adaptation with Keeley Hawes and Max Beesley airs on Sky Max later this year
• The English language is packed with avian references, including ‘up with the lark’, ‘bald as a coot’ (right) and, of course, ‘cuckoo in the nest’
• Other birds named after their call include the chough and the chiffchaff