Celebrate Cuckoo Warning Day on The First Day of Summer Every Year

• By NSC
• 3 Comments.

 

 

Did you know that cuckoos do more than tell time? Yep, they also warn of wet summers.

That’s what Cuckoo Warning Day is all about. If you hear a cuckoo on this day your summer will be wet.

Sounds a bit like Groundhog Day (or Hedgehog Day), depending on an animal’s actions (or call) to predict the next few weeks of weather.

And apparently this day also has its origins in the distant past. Since the Middle Ages Europeans have believed that if the cuckoo sings on this day a wet summer will follow.

 

Cuckoo Trivia

Did you know these things about cuckoos?

• Roadrunners belong to the cuckoo family. … And now all those Roadrunner cartoons make perfect sense! He was just cuckoo. ;)
• Old World cuckoos are not nurturing parents. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and let those birds take care of the cuckoo chicks. (North American cuckoos usually raise their own young).
• And those cuckoo chicks are no better behaved than their parents. They’re demanding and they kick the parents’ real chicks right out of the nest.
• In Europe the cuckoos’ calls are a sign that spring has arrived. Sadly these welcome harbingers of spring have been declining in recent years.
• Only male cuckoos make the sound we recognize as a cuckoo’s call. The females do call, but their calls are quieter.

 

Scroll down for some ideas on celebrating this silly but fun unofficial holiday.

 

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Celebrating Cuckoo Warning Day

There’s not really much to celebrate here. :(

Just listen for the call of a cuckoo. If you hear it, expect a wet summer. If you don’t, expect a dry (or at least not overly wet?) summer.

Assuming you believe in this kind of thing, anyway. We don’t. But it’s a fun thought.

Do you have a cuckoo clock? If you do, we bet you don’t keep it wound regularly (those hourly calls are enough to drive anybody cuckoo!). If that’s true, wind it up just for today, and enjoy the cuckoo’s calls.

If you wish, read and/or recite To The Cuckoo, by William Wordsworth:

 

O Blithe New-comer! I have heard,

I hear thee and rejoice.

O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee Bird,

Or but a wandering Voice?

While I am lying on the grass

Thy Twofold shout I hear,

From hill to hill it seems to pass,

At once far off, and near.

Though babbling only to the Vale,

Of Sunshine and of flowers,

Thou bringest unto me a tale

Of visionary hours.

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!

Even yet thou art to me

No bird, but an invisible thing,

A voice, a mystery;

The same whom in my school-boy days

I listened to; that Cry

Which made me look a thousand ways

In bush, and tree, and sky.

To seek thee did I often rove

Through woods and on the green;

And thou wert still a hope, a love;

Still longed for, never seen.

And I can listen to thee yet;

Can lie upon the plain

And listen, till I do beget

That golden time again.

O blessed Bird! The earth we pace

Again appears to be

An unsubstantial, faery place;

That is fit home for Thee!

 

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