By Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D, June 30, 2026
My mother’s maiden name is Kukulski. In Polish, kukułka means “cuckoo,” and the name carries bird-sound inside it: kuku, kuku. Before the cuckoo became a symbol, before some members of its family evolved brood parasitism, before people made it a marker of seasons, it was a voice moving through the air, a call that gave shape to space to make it place.
This post launches a new Cuckoo series, which will define the Cuckoo family (Cuculidae), describe the first cuckoos, and showcase the natural history of several cuckoo species worldwide. From the Common Cuckoo of European folklore to the roadrunners of the desert Southwest of the United States, we will explore cuckoos as markers of place around the world.
Cuckoos are both maligned and beloved. Some are reviled as brood parasites, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Others are celebrated in poetry and song as birds of spring and summer, longing and return. The word “cuckoo” itself is onomatopoeic, derived from human attempts to imitate the male Common Cuckoo’s distinctive two-note call.
In English, the word first appeared in Medieval times with variants including cuccu, cokkou, kokkow, and cukkuk. An early Middlel English rota, or round, features the song of the cuckoo. “Sumer is icumen in” (“Summer Has Arrived”), also known as “The Cuckoo Song,” was written in the Wessex dialect and preserved in a 13th-century manuscript associated with Reading Abbey. The song is now commemorated in stone relief in the ruins of the abbey. In this old song, the cuckoo, written cuccu, is a harbinger of summer, a manifestation of estival revelry and joy:
Summer has arrived,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
The seed is growing,
The meadow is blooming,
And the wood is coming into leaf now.
Sing, cuckoo!
The English word cuckoo likely came through Old French forms such as cucu, cocu, and coquu, related to modern French coucou. It ultimately connects to a much wider Indo-European pattern of cuckoo words based on the call, including Latin cuculus, Greek kokkyx, German Kuckuck, and related forms in other languages.
In Polish, the cuckoo is kukułka. In the folk song “Kukułeczka kuka,” the little cuckoo serves as a preamble for a more human story. The bird is first named — Kukułeczka kuka — and then enters as sound: kuku, kuku.
Cuckoo kuka,
The boy is looking for a girl
Spozira beats it
And the nose bursts
Kuku, kuku, aha, aha
oh, diridi oj diridi dyna
oh diridi dyna uha
In an Italian folk song, “L’inverno è passato,” winter has passed, April is gone, and May returns al canto del cucù, to the song of the cuckoo. Across languages, the cuckoo arrives first as a voice, a sound that tells people where they are in the year.
Cuckoo, cuckoo
There’s no more April
May came back
On the singing of the cuckoo
Up there, through the mountains
There’s no more snow
Starts making their nest
The poor cuckoo
Poets have heard the cuckoo this way too. Wordsworth wondered whether the cuckoo was a bird or a “wandering Voice,” something heard from the hills and carried back into childhood memory. Wordsworth goes on to describe what the Cuckoo means to him:
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.
John Clare watched the cuckoo less as a symbol and more as a biological bird in the landscape, “like a hawk in flight” and entangled in the lives of other nesting birds. He goes on to describe the scene:
I've watched it on an old oak tree
Sing half an hour away
Until its quick eye noticed me
And then it whewed away.
Between Wordsworth and Clare, they give us two ways of approaching the cuckoo: as a sound that seems to come from everywhere, and as a real animal with hunger, instinct, and ecological relationships.
My mother’s maiden name, Kukulski, carries this bird within it. I think of the Polish Kukulski family as coming from the land of the cuckoos, as do many other families of European origin. Other cuckoo-related surnames include German names such as Kukuk, Kokuk, and Kuckuck; Slavic names such as Kuka and Kukavica; the Sicilian or Italian surname Cuccu; the Russian surname Kokushkin; and Old Norse-derived names such as Gouk and Gook. Across languages, people heard the bird and made its call into speech, song, and surname.
This series begins with a name, but it will venture far beyond this. The cuckoo is neither one bird and nor one story. The Cuckoo family includes roadrunners, anis, coucals, couas, koels, malkohas, ground-cuckoos, hawk-cuckoos, and the familiar brood parasites of Europe and Asia. Some cuckoos raise their own young; some leave their eggs in the nests of others. Some move through forests; others run across desert ground.
Over this series, we will follow the cuckoo through many transitions, from forest to open habitats, from tree life to ground life, from parental care to brood parasitism, from Europe to China and the American Southwest. I begin here, in the land of the cuckoos, because when I asked, like Alice in Wonderland, “Must a name mean something?” the answer was yes. A name can be an invitation, a call to explore, connect, and deepen a sense of place.
References
Beth’s Notes. (n.d.). Kukułeczka kuka. https://www.bethsnotesplus.com/2021/04/kukuleczka-kuka.html
Beth’s Notes. (n.d.). L’inverno è passato. https://www.bethsnotesplus.com/2020/05/linverno-e-passato.html
Clare, J. (n.d.). The Cuckoo. allpoetry https://allpoetry.com/poem/8465491-The-Cuckoo-by-John-Clare
Harper, D. (n.d.). Cuckoo. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved June 30, 2026, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/cuckoo
Lawrence-Mathers, A., & Deeming, H. (n.d.). Harley 978: “Sumer is icumen in” and music at Reading Abbey. Reading Museum. https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/online-exhibitions/reading-abbeys-most-famous-manuscript/harley-978-sumer-icumen-and-music-reading
Mama Lisa’s World. (n.d.). L’inverno è passato. https://www.mamalisa.com/?p=4993&t=es
Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.). Cuckoo, n. Retrieved June 30, 2026, from https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cuckoo_n
Sumer is icumen in. (2026, April 30). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 30, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer_is_icumen_in
Sense of Place 
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