Cuckoldry, Clocks, and Horror: The Wild History of Our Obsession With the Cuckoo Bird

There are plenty of birds that are widely referenced in popular culture today, whether as a sports team name or as the origin for an ubiquitous turn of phrase—looking at you, ugly duckling. But few have the linguistic range of the cuckoo.

The name can evoke both a delirious state of mind (going cuckoo) and a shameful romantic betrayal (being cuckolded). They’re also a type of clock, a symbol for the arrival of spring, a beloved breakfast cereal mascot, and the inspiration behind a recently released indie horror flick (a very solid one, in this reporter’s opinion).

Cynthia Chris, a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, has long studied how people view animals like the cuckoo. And in her newest namesake book Cuckoo, out in paper this month, she details the extensive cultural and scientific history of the bird. Gizmodo spoke to Chris about why she decided to tackle the legacy of the cuckoo, the origins of cuckolding, and what the future might look like for everyone’s favorite feathery brood parasite. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ed Cara, Gizmodo: This is the second book you’ve written about a specific animal, following 2021’s Crab. What made you want to take a closer look at the cuckoo in particular?

Chris: The two books came from very different starting points. I had been following Reaktion’s Animal series for a long time, and wanted very much to write for it. My scholarly work had long focused on the history of nature films and representations of human-animal interactions in film and TV, and I knew that Reaktion was putting out beautiful books by wonderful writers. But every time I thought of an animal I’d like to write about, I’d discover they had already published a volume on that creature. Horse? Done. Donkey? Done. Squid? Done.

Then my partner and I traveled to Costa Rica, and we were staying in a remote location on the Osa Peninsula, on the Atlantic coast. The first evening, I was walking alone on the beach, and I suddenly felt that the ground below my feet was moving. I knelt, and realized I was surrounded by thousands of tiny hermit crabs that were scurrying from the surf to shelter on shore for the night. And I thought: what fascinating creatures! Who are they, what are their lives like? We were off the grid, with no wi-fi, but I made a note to get to see if the Animal series already included a crab book. It didn’t, so I contacted Jonathan Burt, the series editor and an important voice in animal studies, to pitch the idea. He asked me to submit a proposal, which was accepted, and Crab was published in 2021.

“We’d be better off being curious about animal life than moralistic about it.”

I had so much fun researching and writing that book that I immediately asked if Reaktion might be interested in another contribution from me. I hadn’t yet settled on “my next animal,” but the editor I had worked with made a couple of suggestions. One of them was Cuckoo. I was puzzled at first—while in the U.S. we have yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos, they are not terribly common backyard birds, very elusive, and I’d never seen one, let alone the common cuckoo, which breeds in the UK and much of Europe, which was really the bird Reaktion was interested in. But I started learning about the cuckoo, and I couldn’t resist: a fascinating bird, and one that is a common character in myth, folktales, and superstitions.

Gizmodo: In your opinion, just what is it about these birds that have made them so enduring and widely referenced across so many contexts, from cuckolds to cuckoo clocks, throughout the span of human culture?

Chris: One of the cuckoo’s behaviors seems to be the source of their charm—and another seems to be the source of its dicier reputation. The common cuckoo migrates long distances each year, from wintering grounds in Central Africa, to breeding grounds in the UK and Europe (or from South and Southeast Asia to Russia and elsewhere in the north). The British Trust for Ornithology has an amazing Cuckoo Tracking Project, where you can follow the movements of a few tagged birds during their migration. Their arrival has long been heralded as a welcome sign of Spring. That sign is often an aural one, as the common cuckoo is really good at staying out of sight. But the two-note call of the male (“ku-ku”) is unmistakable, and in the breeding season, they call a lot. Given that their migration is so reliably timed each year, it’s no wonder that Bavarian clockmakers copied their call for their famous clocks—and it didn’t hurt that the two notes were far easier to recreate with mechanical bellows than the more complex calls of roosters, quail, or nightingales.

“The common cuckoo population is still large, but it is on the decline, as are some of the songbirds that are its regular hosts. Climate change is making their migrations more difficult.”

But there is another aspect of the cuckoo’s lifecycle that is a big part of cuckoo lore, and it’s one that humans have found disturbing. Common cuckoos are obligate brood parasites. After they mate—which entails only a brief encounter—the male goes on his way to seek his next mating opportunity, and the female lays an egg in another bird’s nest when it’s unguarded. That nest usually belongs to a much smaller bird, a warbler or pipit, for example, who happens to have eggs of a similar color to that of the cuckoo. The host birds will incubate the egg as if it were their own. The cuckoo egg typically hatches first, and the cuckoo hatchling will force unhatched eggs or newly hatched baby birds out of the nest. As the sole survivor, the cuckoo is in a great position to demand food to sate its enormous appetite. They grow quickly, and soon loom over their much smaller hosts, who continue to parent the cuckoo as if it were their own offspring. Eventually, of course, it leaves the nest and goes on to live its cuckoo life. But the hosts have lost a brood, and may not have an opportunity to reproduce again until next year.

The word “cuckold” derives from “cuckoo,” and has been slung around by writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare to James Joyce to poke a bit of fun at men whose wives may be carrying another man’s child. And this trope—the mysterious pregnancy, or the sudden appearance of child of unknown parentage—has become the stuff of any number of horror stories, such as the 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, which was made into movies under the title Village of the Damned in 1960, and again in 1995, and then under its original title as a TV series a couple of years ago. Vivarium (2022) and Cuckoo (2024) also draw their inspiration from brood parasitism.

Gizmodo: What are your own thoughts on the cuckoo’s horror-inspiring breeding strategy?

Chris: Truth be told, the animal kingdom creates new life in many, many ways, and the cuckoo’s is just one of them, however uncomfortable it might make some people. It seems silly to me to judge a non-human animal’s reproductive strategies, and the disgust evoked by brood parasitism says more about us than it does about them. We’d be better off being curious about animal life than moralistic about it.

Gizmodo: How are the birds themselves doing? Are there any reasons to be worried about the future of the cuckoo, particularly the common cuckoo most well-known to us?

Chris: It’s complicated. The BTO’s surveys indicate that the common cuckoo population is still large, but it is on the decline, as are some of the songbirds that are its regular hosts. Climate change is making their migrations more difficult—wildfires in Spain make it more difficult for them to rest and feed along the way; the Sahara Desert is expanding, which means that migrating birds have further to go over dry, sparse land with few spots for them to refuel. As for the larger cuckoo family, Cuculidae, which includes malkohas, couas, and coucals, there are certainly species listed as vulnerable or endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), largely due to habitat loss in Sri Lanka, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, and elsewhere. Ten years ago, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service declared the Western Yellow-Billed Cuckoo threatened, and has taken steps to protect some of its habitat. These are all reminders of how much humans have degraded the environment in which all animals—non-human and human alike—depend on.

Gizmodo: Is there anything else that you would want to tell prospective readers?

Chris: I hope that readers who are curious about animals of all kinds will take a look at Cuckoo and the other books in Reaktion’s wonderful Animal series—there are over a hundred volumes in print!

Cuckoo, published by Reaktion Books and distributed through The University of Chicago Press, is now available to buy as a e-book or in paper.