by Nicolette L. Cagle, August 24, 2026
In the last post, we investigated two North American cuckoos: The Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoos. We followed them between continents and through forests whose resources pulse, including leaves bursting forth after monsoon rains, caterpillars swarming during outbreaks, and cicadas rising from the soil. Both cuckoo species respond strongly to temporary surpluses, changing movement and local abundance patterns.
In this post, we follow these two birds into the landscapes of cultural memory, music, and language. Importantly in these landscapes, Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoos are often called rain crows. That name appears in place-specific Indigenous records, a Black Piedmont fiddle tune, and American poetry and nature writing. These sources do not give the cuckoos a universal meaning. Instead, they show different communities paying attention to an elusive bird and recognizing the sound of time and place.
“Rain crow” is one of the cuckoos’ most durable names. Both species are said to call before rain, perhaps because humid, cloudy weather alters their activity or maybe simply because a memorable call is easy to connect to an approaching summer storm. Indigenous records of the rain crow are complicated, since the available written sources are local, historically mediated, and often filtered through non-Native collectors who may have supplied their own interpretations or collapsed the two cuckoo species into one.
For example, in an 1884 vocabulary of Chippewa (more accurately today referred to as Ojibwe and related Anishinaabe communities in North America) bird names, W. W. Cooke listed one term for “cuckoo, both species.” This word, pi-gua-o-ko’-que-o-we’-shi, was described as an imitation of the cuckoos’ call and, according to Cooke, was associated with foretelling rain.
A North Carolina Cherokee example elicits different meanings. In one Aniyvwiya (a way that tribal members may refer to themselves, roughly translating to “the real people”) love formula recorded in the late 19th century, a speaker disparages his romantic rivals by comparing them to several disfavored animals, including the rain crow (Mooney, 1891).
In a Meskwaki (also known as the Fox) account of the Bear gens (or Bear Clan) Thunder Dance, published by Truman Michelson in 1929, a flute was used to imitate the rain crow. Here, the cuckoos’ cultural presence entered explicitly through sound, and it continues to do so in other cultural traditions.
The rain crow also lives in Black Piedmont music. Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson open their 2025 album, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, with “Rain Crow,” one of 18 North Carolina fiddle and banjo tunes. Many of these songs came through their mentor Joe Thompson, a Black Piedmont fiddler and one of the last musicians of his generation to carry the southern Black string-band tradition. The album is rooted in place, recorded at locations in Mebane (Thompson’s home), Morganton (Etta Baker’s house), and Red Springs (Mill Prong, a former plantation) all in North Carolina (Cahill, 2025; Nonesuch Records, 2025), sites representing complex and overlapping human and ecological histories.
According to Cahill (2025), Justin Robinson explained that Joe Thompson called the tune “Rain Crow” and understood the bird to be a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, whose voice signaled summertime rain. The song’s structure descends from a 19th-century minstrel song, “Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.” Robinson notes that the song contains ecological information, and that communities that recognized the rain crow also experienced a forested landscape that was larger and more continuous than it is today (Cahill, 2025).
Remarkably, the creation of this album also coincided with a pulse of one of the cuckoos’ staple prey: periodical cicadas. Gidden and Robinson recorded the album in 2024, a year when both 13-year Brood XIX and 17-year Brood XIII cicadas emerged together for the first time since 1803. There are “two different broods” in the album’s soundscape, capturing a North Carolina cicada emergence along with rainstorms and wrens in the album’s tracks (Cahill, 2025; Nonesuch Records, 2025).
Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Images sources in References).
Turning to Europe, the word “cuckoo” arrived in the English-language as an onomatopoeia of the call of the Common Cuckoo, a Eurasian species. Medieval lyrics, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and the cuckoo clock all invoke this species, a gray brood parasite whose two-note call announces spring. American writers sometimes banked on that Anglo-European inheritance, but often leaned into the specific behavior of local American birds, noting that the Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoos call differently and usually raise their own young. This literature attends to American folk beliefs and bird biology closely, and presents the cuckoo as a “weather-wise” recluse, a late-summer savior, and a survivor.
James Russell Lowell, an American Romantic poet, gets some of the ecology right in his 1867 poem, “The Nightingale in the Study.” The “cuckoo weather-wise, | Still hiding farther onward” calls the Massachusetts-based scholar outdoors (Lowell, 1867). The poem highlights two key ideas that have followed America cuckoos: weather knowledge and concealment.
American naturalist John Burroughs was particularly explicit about the elusive nature of American cuckoos. In Locusts and Wild Honey, a non-fiction book of nature essays, Burroughs wrote that the American cuckoo was “printed, as they say, but not published.” In other words, it is present in the woods but not yet known to inattentive people. He described its voice as solitary and hermit-like, and he connected the Black-billed Cuckoo’s June visits to orchards with the presence of cankerworms and other hairy larvae (Burroughs, 1879). His natural history was observant, but he didn’t yet know that the American species do occasionally engage in brood parasitism, albeit on a far lesser scale than their European cousins.
Kentucky poet Madison Cawein made the cuckoo the center of August landscape instead. In “The Rain Crow,” published in Accolon of Gaul, with Other Poems, he moves us through a droughty wheatfield and throbbing locusts (i.e., cicadas) to a cuckoo sensing a storm that transforms the parched landscape (Cawein, 1889).
Contemporary poets associate the cuckoos’ hiddenness with interior and political life. Tara Bray’s “Yellow-Billed Cuckoo: Years Post Trauma” makes the shyness of the cuckoos a metaphor for memory and healing, and the bird’s intentional movement becomes a way to think about survival after years of fear (Bray, 2021). Betsy Andrew’s climate poem “Crowded” give a Yellow-billed Cuckoo an opening line, “It’s image salad,” before presenting a collage of political agencies and language, turning the unassuming bird into a witness of political disorder (Andrews, 2022).
Across cultures, the two reclusive American cuckoo species move through ecology and experience. A bird heard more often than seen became a barometer that entered Indigenous story and ceremony, Black Piedmont music, and Anglo-American and modern literature. In future posts, we will return to the wider cuckoo family and follow other species through their own landscapes, unearthing new stories as we go.
References
Andrews, B. (2022). Crowded. Nauset Press. https://poems.com/poem/its-image-salad-says-the-yellow-billed-cuckoo-fair-enough-lets-check-in-on-the-agencies/
Bernhardt, C. (2024, April 25). Periodical cicadas, 2024: Entomologists prepare for the six-week serenade. Entomology Today. https://entomologytoday.org/2024/04/25/periodical-cicadas-2024-brood-xix-xii-entomologists-prepare-six-week-serenade/
Bray, T. (2021, February 19). Yellow-billed Cuckoo: Years post-trauma. Terrain.org. https://www.terrain.org/2021/poetry/tara-bray-2/
Burroughs, J. (1879). Locusts and wild honey. Houghton, Osgood and Company. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6355/6355-h/6355-h.htm
Cahill, G. (2025, July/August). Justin Robinson and Rhiannon Giddens pay homage to the past on What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow. Strings. https://stringsmagazine.com/justin-robinson-and-rhiannon-giddens-pay-homage-to-the-past-on-what-did-the-blackbird-say-to-the-crow/
Cawein, M. J. (1889). The rain-crow. In Accolon of Gaul, with other poems. John P. Morton & Company. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33686
Cooke, W. W. (1884). Bird nomenclature of the Chippewa Indians. The Auk, 1(3), 242–250. https://doi.org/10.2307/4066840
Lowell, J. R. (1867, September). The nightingale in the study. The Atlantic Monthly. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1867/09/the-nightingale-in-the-study/628173/
Michelson, T. (1929). Observations on the Thunder Dance of the Bear gens of the Fox Indians (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 89). U.S. Government Printing Office. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/15556
Mooney, J. (1891). The sacred formulas of the Cherokees. In Seventh annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885–1886 (pp. 301–398). U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24788/24788-h/24788-h.htm
Nonesuch Records. (2025, February 5). Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson’s What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow due April 18 on Nonesuch Records. https://www.nonesuch.com/journal/rhiannon-giddens-justin-robinson-what-did-blackbird-say-crow-april-18-nonesuch-2025-02-09
Rosen, M. J. (2009). The cuckoo’s haiku and other birding poems (S. Fellows, Illus.). Candlewick Press. https://search.worldcat.org/title/227575174
Image 1: https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/species/9399
Image 2: https://www.fws.gov/story/2023-07/yellow-billed-cuckoo
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