Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/497863
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 19 APRIL 2015 Opinion 23 at the plight of that single bird, and are about to take to the social media to pour out all your grief, anger and thirst for vengeance… just remember that there's still the rest of this season to go, then every season after that for the foreseeable future… and we can predict from now how it's all going to work out. BANG! Oops! Sorry… I could have sworn it was a common quail in the early morning light. But now that it's dead at my feet, and the sun is up… I belatedly realise it was actually an entire family of storks. Odd, isn't it? And as for that night heron I just hid under that rock… well, the sun got in my eyes. And what do you mean, flamingos look nothing like turtle doves? Are you blind? They're both pink… in fact, ALL birds look like both turtle dove and quail, when viewed from a certain angle at a certain time of day… oh look, there's a turtle dove right now… BANG! And on it goes. So you'd better all get used to it, for your own sakes. As any psychiatrist will tell you, it is not humanly possible to sustain the sheer level of nationwide grief we all saw this week… each time a single bird is shot dead in Malta in spring. It's like having an attack of emotive hysteria every time you drive over a pothole. Your heart won't hold out. The long-term psychological consequences would be devastating. It might, in a word, drive you cuckoo. Which brings me to the original point about how very apt it is that the bird we all flagellated ourselves over this week happened to be a cuckoo. Exactly why this bird lent its name to a euphemism for insanity, I cannot say for certain. I suspect it has something to do with its call, which does (let's face it) sound a little bonkers… in a Laurel and Hardy sort of way. But this is terribly unfair on the poor cuckoo itself. Cuckoos are not 'insane' at all… quite the contrary: they display remarkable lucidity and calculating connivance, for a creature with a brain roughly the size of a toenail-cutting. Contrary to widespread perception, this bird does not live in a clock (nor, for that matter, in cloud cuckoo land). It lives in other bird's nests. Specifically, it is reared, fed and protected – from the moment it hatches – by another, unrelated bird. A bird that was deceived by a stratagem so cunning, so gleefully murderous, so Machiavellian and so devilishly clever… that I'm almost afraid that to go any further would be to dampen your grief over the particular specimen that was shot this week. The cuckoo is, in fact, an arch- villain… the Moriarty of avian crime. No vulture, no bird of prey, no Marabou stork nightmare, no owl and no devil-bird – no, not even the biggest bustard that ever lived – can quite match this flying fiend for sheer evil and (literally) brooding malice. For like all great criminal masterminds, the cuckoo preys on the credulity and good faith of other birds. But unlike most, it does not work alone. The treachery of the cuckoo lies in the careful premeditation of its (remarkably complex) plan, which perforce requires teamwork. 'Live in other bird's nests', did I say? No, the reality is much more sinister than that. Like a vampire, the female cuckoo surreptitiously enters the nest while its male partner is busy luring away the rightful owners (i.e., smaller birds, with smaller and more defenceless young). Once inside, the female cuckoo will lay a single egg onto an existing clutch, knowing full well that the fledgling cuckoo will murder all other occupants immediately upon hatching. Infanticide. Like the most nefarious villains of history and literature – Richard III (Shakespeare version), King Herod, my old maths teacher at school (who bored thousands of innocent children to death throughout the 1980s) – the cuckoo is a child-killer. And from the very first instance of its entire being, its perfidy extends to guile and deception also. Having coldly despatched the entire legitimate brood, the fledgling cuckoo will easily hoodwink the parent bird(s) into believing that it has not so much murdered, but rather 'become' all their pretty chickens in one fell swoop. And like the besotted parents they are, these unsuspecting victims will toil and labour tirelessly to give the foundling impostor chick the best possible start to life… while its real biological parents fly around freely, without a care in the world, blissfully untroubled by the bother and inconvenience of parenthood (until they fly over Malta, when it's… BANG!) So you can even add 'sponging off the welfare state' to the cuckoo's growing list of crimes. And THAT, as we all know from the last Budget, is infinitely more odious than merely murdering the odd little infant every now and again. There. Feel a little better about the dead cuckoo, now that you know the true nature of that cute feathered little thing whose corpse you all saw in the papers? Still feel the same resentment towards the hunter? If he was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you'd all be cheering by now. Well, he slew a creature infinitely more evil and maleficent than any member of the Undead. He slew a cuckoo. And that's one less child- killing, blood sucking, job-stealing 'unknown father' to make it to another bird's nest this year, and con some other birdbrained parents into bringing up his murderous, illegitimate bastard for free. And look at you all. Weeping and wailing over the fallen villain; cursing and rebuking the man who finally put a stop to a dastardly career in crime and social abuse. And they call the cuckoo 'cuckoo'… cuckoo's nest However you choose to interpret the incident – regrettable accident, or wilful, premeditated cuckoo-cide in the first degree – it still points towards the same negligent, 'shoot-first-ask- questions-later' attitude that has permeated this entire issue from the very beginning The common cuckoo, a widespread summer migrant to Europe and Asia