Sense of Place

Tag: ornithology

  • From the Time of the Cuckoos

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    Nicolette Cagle
    in

    by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., July 1, 2026 Before the cuckoo family (Cuculidae) embedded itself in the ancient rites of Hera in Greece or the cuckoo clock folk art of Germanic Europe, the cuckoo arose from the annals of deep time, straddling the devastation of the K-Pg boundary (66 Ma), when planet Earth lost 75%…

  • From the Land of the Cuckoos

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    by

    Nicolette Cagle
    in ,

    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…