Rannoch tales - the Cuckoo in Winter
It is well known that cuckoos come to Rannoch in spring and leave in the summer if they are adults or the autumn if they are the young. But is it not true that anything is possible?
One spring many years ago a large and handsome male cuckoo pulsating with testosterone flew in from Africa. He was arrogant and loud and let’s face it, no genius and was thus known as Trumpeter to his peers.
He soon had the ladies bubbling away as his cuckooing reverberated from Schiehallion to Beinn a'Chuallaich. His ladies after submitting to his will, slipped off stealthily to carry out their infamous egg laying. (They are nest parasites you know)
As we are all aware, they look for the nests of birds such as dunnocks, meadow pipits and reed warblers and there they lay a single egg. When it hatches the young cuckoo arches its back and pushes the hosts’ eggs (or young if the eggs have hatched) out of the nest and thereby gets all the attention of the parents. The hosts do not recognise the young cuckoo as an imposter and work hard to feed and nurture the growing parasite. It becomes huge compared with the parents and they may even have to perch on its back to feed it.
Such is the strangeness of nature and yet this particular year, something even stranger took place. One of the lady cuckoos (as it happens called Doris) who turned out to be short-sighted and not very bright laid her egg in the nest, not of a standard-sized dunock or meadow pipit, but in the nest of the diminutive wren.
Imagine the mother wren’s surprise when it could hardly squeeze into its own spherical nest because of a vast cuckoo’s egg put there by Doris.
The son of Trumpeter and Doris grew apace because although wrens are indisputably small they are very hard working. If fact they are workaholics. The air was thick with flying wrens carrying an airborne conveyor belt of insects to the expanding leviathan.
Wrens have a sense of humour - it's not a very advanced one admittedly, but it does exist and they decided to call their gargantuan adopted son Justin in recognition of his relationship with the nest. In the end he wasn't even just in. He expanded so much that he burst the nest and had to sit on a branch to be fed. Day after day the wrens turned the air red hot with their frenetic journeying and the whine of their flights gave the neighbouring blackbird tinnitus.
The wrens worked their socks off but they are such small birds that Justin was not ready to fly until long after all the other young cuckoos were sunbathing on the beach in Africa. You might have thought that this was curtains for Justin, what with winter approaching and all. If you did flirt with the curtain notion, even for a minute, you would not have reckoned with Justin’s resourcefulness. In spite of the low IQ of both of his parents it turns out that he was something of a genius amongst cuckoos. Perhaps it was something to do with his protracted childhood? Anyway it couldn't have been genetics.
It was the end of November by the time that Justin was ready to fly and as anyone who lives in Rannoch knows, at this time of the year, the sun scarcely peeps over the horizon long enough to warm the horizontal sleet. This could have spelled disaster for a lesser bird but Justin simply told the wrens that he was hanged if he was going to fly to Africa and he would spend the winter in sun-kissed Kinloch Rannoch instead.
Whatever its merits as a domicil, there are not many expert ornithologists in Kinloch Rannoch and so Justin was able to visit bird tables under the radar so to speak. He achieved a very passable great tit imitation. He developed a liking for peanuts and grew skilled at swinging upside down under half cocoanuts. No bird feeder was safe from his attentions. His piece de resistance was to swoop in through the open door of the Dunalastair Hotel to dine on the leftovers of the affluent.
All in all, even in January, he was a well fed cuckoo. Food, of course, is an important thing in winter but what about shelter I hear you ask. The fact is that the church had a cuckoo in the belfry and howl as the winds might, there was one contented bird there with his head under his wing. On Sundays he would practise aerial manoeuvres during the service and perturb the Minister by adorning his sermon sheets with droppings. Thus it was that Justin passed the first winter after hatching in comfort, plenty and innocent fun.
When spring returned he was as sleek and fit as any bird could be and ready to cuckoo with the best of them in order to mesmerise the fairer sex with his mellifluous song. Such was his success in the mating game that he fathered a multitude of offspring before one sad day he missed his footing on a cocoanut and cuckooed his last.
If you listen carefully through the moaning of the winter gales you may well hear the cuckooing of one of Justin’s descendants anytime between November and March - As Justin always said - why flog your way to Africa when you can live a life of luxury in Kinloch Rannoch?