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Subject: The pleasure of hearing a cuckoo punctually on the fourteenth

Location: Cassiobury Park, Watford

I thought I’d try something different for this one. Birdsong is a difficult thing to convey in a photograph, so instead of focussing on the cuckoo, I decided to concentrate on the pleasure of hearing its distinctive call. The cuckoo is a bird that is often heard and seldom seen, so this seemed a good idea.

So on the fourteenth of April I persuaded my wiser half to sit on this bench in the park and I took this photograph, which I think conveys the pleasure of birdsong. It was taken with the 105mm 2.5 manual lens I wrote about here.

To illuminate this post a little more, here’s a link to a poem about cuckoos which dates back to the thirteenth century. And below is a video of the male cuckoo making its distinctive call. Interestingly this changes at midsummer from ‘cuck-oo’ to ‘cuocuckoo‘. What you hear here is the spring variety.