Long after he had any conceivable chance of luring a mate, the cuckoo sang on. In midsummer week, he lulled me to sleep and stirred me awake the next morning. His abrupt ku-ku lacked the drag and mid-phrase pause of the typical cuckoo. I read desperation into his mispronounced insistency. Days later, a “normal” cuckoo call from the same spot. Had the errant bird self-corrected or was this a newcomer?
All is quiet now, unfulfilled cuckoos bound for Africa, exhausted blackbirds out of melody. All apart from the drowsy high priests of summer. Every day, without fail, they top and tail our waking hours, a duo that never duets. Pigeon, dove, dove, pigeon. Though they rarely overlap or interrupt, each plays out its repetitious call and response, and enticements to others of its kind, seemingly without regard to its cousin.
Yesterday evening, a clank on the chimney pot announced a wood pigeon, and a voice thick with pollen came down the flue, the usual five-syllable song. Prior to that, the dawn collared dove began with a regular coo, coo-cu but clipped its call to four or five disyllabic utterances – a typical variation that can give rise to reports of late summer cuckoos.
If its beat is otherwise steady, the same cannot be said for pitch and emphasis, every salvo sounding as if it were an open-beak mystery to its maker. I can hear one now as I write; it starts high, then goes low, stressing the opening or the middle section.
On an hour-long walk earlier, I heard collared doves from the rooftops, from the telegraph poles over the barley and the railway line. Plus those little extras – the woo, woo, woo of beating wings, and that peculiar startled cry on landing, the sound we might make if we stepped into a cold river in hot July. Eight calling doves in one short circuit as the day warmed, with wood pigeons filling the gaps.
It’s hard to imagine a time when incessant interchanges between these two birds did not happen. And yet before the Queen’s accession, nobody had heard a collared dove in the British Isles. They colonised from the east, in the fastest spread of any bird within recorded history. Sing on, pretty dove.
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