Anyone who's heard an English cuckoo knows where it got its name. Cuckoos make a two-note call, the first sounding like the vowel in "cook" and the second like the vowel in "coo." Between the two ...

The cuckoo chick has a slightly concave area on its back. It uses this characteristic to manipulate and push eggs or baby birds out of the nest. Aristotle speculated on this behavior.

Back in 2001, when I failed to hear a single cuckoo in my part of the West Country for the first time in 50 years, I wrote a letter to The Times headed “The last cuckoo”, which naturally wasn ...