‘May is the month of the cuckoo … Everyone living in the countryside knows when the cuckoos start arriving because you cannot help hearing the loud, eerie, almost human call of the male bird. It quite literally says, “Cuck-koo, cuck-koo,” and the voice carries for miles … Unlike most other birds, cuckoos do not pair up and stay together, so there are no marriages or family life in cuckooland. No cuckoo has ever bothered to build its own nest or hatch or feed its young. The female (carrying her egg in her beak) searches the hedgerows until she finds the nest of another bird that already has eggs in it, and she slips her own egg in with the others and flies away and forgets all about it. ‘ … The mother hedge sparrow doesn’t seem to mind at all and proceeds to sit on the egg and incubate it together with her own. Little does she know what is going to happen when all the eggs hatch … the cuckoo chick grows three times as fast as the little sparrows. The overgrown baby cuckoo proceeds quite literally to push the baby hedge sparrows one by one out of the nest to die, and in the end all that is left is this grotesque, huge, fluffy cuckoo chick filling the entire nest. The hedge sparrow parents don’t seem to notice what has happened and they go on feeding this murderer until in the end it is big enough to hop out of the nest and fly away without so much as a thank you!’