The Strange Love of Cuckoos and Currawongs

Across generations, complex and troubled relationships live out between parasitic nesting bird species and their hosts. These dramatic encounters can be observed in suburban skies and trees, as we humans go about our daily routines, seldom noticing the extreme events occurring around us. Exploitation, deception, and parental devotion entwine within these parasitic nests, embedding into species habits, physiology, and even genetics. Sustainable, yet never easy or comfortable.

This speculative story unfolds across a breeding season, following each avian character’s experience of their encounters throughout that time. It begins in Papua New Guinea as the channel-billed cuckoo adults commence their migratory flight to the east coast of Australia. It ends as the nest host birds, the pied currawongs, assess their depleted survivor status after the cuckoo chick has left them and joined with its genetic kin.

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Cuckoo 1: The air feels heavier, the sky closer. I become annoyed by the canopy. I have fed well on forest fruits in this steaming place. Now, the calls of my kind pierce the forest,  and my body hears them. Groaark, waark, aark!

Cuckoo 2: In this New Guinea forest we feed on abundant fruit, aware that the other half of our lives will be starkly different.  

Cuckoo 1: When the clouds begin to hang lower, my blood rushes. I lift myself in heavy beats as the storm clouds gather. I, storm-bird, giant cuckoo, follow the calls of my clan. We leave the forest cover and fly south.

Human: I am not a bird, and all of this is interpretation, translation—from your grey, feathered body, your calls, your red-eyed glances, to my watching, storytelling body, and my human language. Inevitably I will misinterpret. Yet, my attempts to understand are the least I can do to create a future with you, channel-billed cuckoo. 

Currawong 1: Coora-corra! As we gather in this wooded country, my clan finds its voice again, its soaring dance. The springtime makes us magnificent. We soar and dive across the sky together.

Currawong 2: Tchew! My flight, my sound, begin to find their match–the one whose notes sing back to mine, the one whose flight aligns with mine. Until here we are, a pair, singing together, resting together after spiraling and swooping together.

Currawong 1: Coora-coora!

Currawong 2: Tchew! 

Cuckoo 1: Groaark, waark! Flight carries me forward, unbidden, until the land becomes patched with bright green shapes, and the coast appears below. I stop at islands across the straits, feed in orchards or patches of forest then cross more land to my troubled second home. 

Cuckoo 2: It has been so long, but yes, this feels like home. Here, our life means constant attacks. Small birds, large birds, they will chase me until I can conceal myself within a head of leaves high in a tree. I know these birds well. Our futures depend on understanding their habits and limits. We will entwine them with our own and use them. Groaark! 

Currawong 1: We are trying out the tall and sturdy trees and forking branches for a nest. We fuss around a promising fork, placing sticks cautiously. Coorra coorra. 

Currawong 2: A wind moves through the branches. A stick, not yet sturdy in its place, falls. Then everything seems to shatter—that horror—the channel-billed cuckoo’s call, distant but clear. After many months unheard and, ridiculously, forgotten. Somehow, although at one level we know this as well as anything, we are unprepared for it. 

Currawong 1: It crashes into our dreams of simple, earnest parenthood, reminding us of the inevitability of labor, death, and struggle—of the twistedness of all we know and do and are. The cuckoos descend heavily upon our world like a veil of tension, and weave their lives into ours, changing everything.  

Human: I am swept up into profound dramas happening in the trees and skies around me, making a human-oriented reading of these suburban streets feel trite and insignificant. I notice a change sweep across the bird communities with the arrival of the cuckoos. Birds turn their heads to scan the sky. Anxiety flies into the early spring excitement.  

Cuckoo 2: After half a year of separation, now is our time to fly together, to mate. We also survey the partnering currawongs, watch their nest-building, anticipate their egg-laying times. Groaark, waark, aark!

Cuckoo 1: As the currawong nests begin to appear, I gather tasty fruit and offer a gesture of mating interest. Groaark! 

Cuckoo 2: Accepting your fruit, we join to mate. Groaark, waark, aark! 

Human: These relationships, seemingly cruel and deceitful, are part of an ancient routine, continuing across thousands of generations. I wonder how currawong agility, strength, and community intelligence have developed in resistance to, accommodation of, and resilience to be sustainable with cuckoos. I wonder how these individual birds manage the complex reality of relationships that are not only exploitative, not only caring, not only deceitful, not only dependent.  

Currawong 1: We wake early and claim the quiet morning soundspace to find and greet each other. Coorra coorra… 

Currawong 2: Tchew! We work fast, preparing a nest in the few days before I must lay my eggs into a peaceful morning. My sense of achievement is great, but my heart thumps as I listen hard for fearsome wingbeats. 

Cuckoo 1: Groaark, waark, aark! I hop quietly between densely leafed trees and watch. I notice the direction the currawongs take their nest-building materials and how long they spend before returning. I know the approximate site. Now, flying fast and high overhead, I spot the nest.  

Cuckoo 2: I am ready to lay, and this brood parent pair are newly on the nest. The campaign begins. For us, everything hinges on this. Waark, aark, aark. 

Cuckoo 1: I make the first swoop above the nest, stirring up the surrounding birds, alerting the parent who is off collecting food. I swoop this parent bird who charges to fend me off. I fly about the surrounding trees, landing nearby. Always, the parent swoops and snaps. Groaark! 

Cuckoo 2: Eventually the parent sitting on the nest grows agitated and hops out a little, then a little more—joining the work to fend you off. While the parents are distracted with you, I quickly and quietly lay my egg and leave.  

Currawong 2: I am shaken, confused, and tired. The cuckoo has gone again. The eggs are still here. Perhaps we are okay. The months ahead will unfold and bring their challenges, whatever they will be. I fuss my eggs beneath my feathers and rest. As I doze, my dreams fill with the calls and shapes of large billed, grey monsters. 

Cuckoo 2: That was successful—one egg laid! I will need another nest soon. These currawongs have a delicate strength and beauty. They raised me well, I know their music as the music of my childhood. I love them for their attentive parental care. I love them and I use them, as always. They fear me, hate me, succumb to me, but also, they love me, strangely, as their monstrous chick, their strange kin. Waark, aark, aark. 

Currawong 1: The days and weeks pass now with less drama. About thirty days we spend upon the nest, taking turns to sit or forage and watch for goannas and ravens. We take turns to join the evening caroling and swooping—if we are absent, we fall in status. The cuckoos soar overhead, but seldom call. Coora, coorawa!  

Cuckoo 1: We are pleased to see the nest keepers on our egg, but we don’t want to disturb them. If we get too close, they will be alarmed and leave the nest to drive us away. So we fly above, watching and checking, quietly, and from a distance.  

Human: For every stand-alone species, there are approximately four that are parasitic. Each time a species becomes extinct it takes its parasitic species with it. Parasitic relationships involving the reproductive life stage are particularly delicately entangled. To rely upon another species to reproduce is a deep evolutionary commitment.  

Cuckoo chick: A feeling of confinement, and now, the need to push against it. There it is, I have made it open. My little heart pumps so hard I am afraid I might burst. Now more pushing, and there—I am hatched! Cheep, cheep. 

Currawong 2: Our first hatchling, our first gaping mouth. There is joy for the wonder and achievement of it, fear for the precarity and danger of it, and concern for the effort and attention that it will demand. But we are strong and clever, and know what this place can offer—where to find the berries, the figs, the skinks, the beetles.  

Cuckoo chick: I am nothing yet but a hunger and a heartbeat. Feed me! Aaaaa, aaaaaa! I’m newborn, knowing nothing except to gawp and cry. I never notice the two other chicks that hatch two days after I do. I am larger and louder, and their mouths are never as wide or elevated as mine when a parent arrives.

Currawong 1: Our chick is now our life’s focus. That mouth, that cry, bind us without mercy. I practice all my skill and local knowledge to find the food this mouth demands. Cooora cooraa!  

Currawong 2: It is not too many days before I suspect the chick is a cuckoo. I do not recall even seeing my own chicks—did they hatch? We will be cuckoo parents now, and the months ahead will test us to our limits. Tchew! 

Currawong 1: I experience a bleak awareness of being exploited and a grief in wondering if my own young has been lost. Yet, as I work, I am unable or unwilling to break my commitment to a future that comprises more than my own family. I sing to the chick with our gentle family song when I have the energy. My grief is tangled with my hope; my despair is tangled with my love. Coora! 

Cuckoo chick: I grow. My legs stretch. I begin to enjoy my wings. These feeders never come fast enough, they never bring enough! Aaaa! Aaaa!

Cuckoo 1: We soar above, watching our nest parents tending our chicks. We are full of hope, but helpless. Will they survive the work, will the region provide enough? My hope reaches out towards these nest parents. I wish them their bodies’ best strength. Groaark, waark, aark! 

Cuckoo 2: We call to our babies as we fly near them, so they can know our shapes and sounds. Groaark! Groaark! I bother the air with my regular flights, anxious peering, and motherly calls. It is hard work for my child to learn to recognize my sounds among those of its nursing parents.

Cuckoo chick: Many sounds become familiar in my world. But one sound reaches further into my awareness. This call screeches above me and awakens something urgent. A huge shape soars above. Its image fixes behind my eyelids, and the call continues inside my hearing—waark, aark, aark—it goes, on and on in my head. 

Currawong 1: I feel sick and old, barely managing. I search for food as near as possible to the chick and feed it sometimes a mouthful of sticky soil, just to catch a small delay. 

Currawong 2: I heave myself off a branch and my heart thumps from tiredness from the smallest flight. The days are heavy, boring, and long, feeding a never-satisfied mouth. I’ve lost touch with my kin, no longer gathering with them in the evenings. I am quiet with no energy left for calling, my self is disappeared into the work.   

Cuckoo chick: Look, I am standing on the branch. My wings demand their space, and it feels good to feel the way they want to move. I walk along the branch opening them. And now, I fear it and hesitate, but still, I do it—jumping and flapping to land on a branch beneath. Aaaah! Aaaaah! 

Currawong 1: Now it should be time for this young bird to learn from us—to descend to the ground and watch us as we pick up grubs, to try our family calls. It stares blankly at our beaks. It has already taken so long to get to this stage! It is hard to admit it is a cuckoo; it cannot become a currawong, no matter how I might wish it to.  

Cuckoo chick: Here I am, on a branch in another tree, and now, look, another! I will not move to the ground. I need to find a dense clump of leaves high up, where I can be still and wait—but for what? I hide now, in my leafy cover, quiet and still.  

Cuckoo 2: It is time to collect our young cuckoo! Come fly and call with us. We are gathering in the giant fruiting fig trees for our evening feasts—join us there, come be a cuckoo now! Groaark, aark! 

Cuckoo chick: As the light softens towards evening, a great grey birds arrives nearby. Not far away, a large, noisy group of them are circling.  

Cuckoo 1: Join us, join us! Come be a cuckoo! Groaark, waark, aark!

Cuckoo chick: I feel able to hear its invitation, a message perhaps for me? I try to stay still and hidden, but the world around me is charged and changed. Suddenly I am in the air, flying across open sky, alongside this stranger whom I know, following. My voice joins the ruckus—waark, waark, aark!  

Curawong 1: The cuckoo has gone. We can finally rest. Suddenly the world seems so quiet! Gradually, the diverse sounds of the world reemerge for me. They seem strange after that continual yelling. Then the world realigns into its normal forms. Soon it is only me that is different: older, weaker, more nervous. How are you?Coora-coora!

Currawong 2: I am suddenly lost within an emptiness vacant of sound and demand. I jump and watch, alert, to nothing, with exhausted stress. This absence is so desired, but my body will need time to recover. But many summer and autumn months are still ahead, and I will find my way through. We will be okay. Tchew!

Human: The cuckoos linger along the east coast for another month. Near my house, they indulge each evening in the huge old Morton Bay fig trees along the edge of the park. Soon, they will return across the Torres Strait to New Guinea.  

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Featured Image: Pied currawong bird in Great Otway National Park, Victoria, Australia. Photo by Nina Spiess, 2018.

Kate Judith’s work explores approaches to developing a more finely attuned attentiveness to inter-responsiveness within relations, decentering the human to demonstrate non-anthropocentric approaches to research and understanding. Her 2023 book, Exploring Interstitiality with Mangroves: Semiotic Materialism and the Environmental Humanities, filters conceptual discussions of being in-between through mangrove ecological processes. Kate holds adjunct positions at the University of New South Wales and the University of Southern Queensland. Contact.