Was It a Cuckoo?

It’s a cuckoo! Stop the car, stop the car — back up to just before that big dead tree on the side of the road.”

There, at 6:15 on a bright June morning, winding our way along narrow roads among the hedgerows of central Italy, I saw a large bird, smaller than a crow but bigger than a robin (all the birding books have a sample size chart that runs from sparrow to robin to crow to heron or some other very large bird) mostly gray but with flashes of white, long-bodied and perched upright like a predator on a bare branch, giving it an unobstructed view of skittering rodents or smaller songbirds.

We are due to catch a train in the tiny dusty town of Terontola; we are close and have left ourselves plenty of time, so with a sigh, my husband Andy brakes and then backs up 100 feet or so while I scrabble in my too-tightly packed backpack for my binoculars. I wear my binoculars as much as I possibly can — while walking pretty much anywhere, from the sidewalks and parks of New York or Washington to the towpath on the Delaware-Raritan canal, when driving to the store, or when sitting and working with a view of a feeder or an olive tree. I look a little odd, I know, but it is an article of my birding faith that if I do not have my binoculars around my neck or within easy reach, I am bound to see a bird that I have never seen before or one that I very much want to see again.

Here’s the proof, once again. If I’d had my binoculars, I could have grabbed at least a glimpse of my presumed cuckoo. But they are tightly wedged in with my books and toiletries, with snug protective covers over their lenses, and by the time we have reversed far enough to take a good luck at the tree, the bird is gone.

We have cuckoos in Umbria; I hear their unmistakable eponymous call in the mornings and evenings and through the somnolent air of Italian Sunday afternoons, a quiet so deep that it has its own presence, seeping through the cracks of the stones and through the shafts of slanting light.

I heard one earlier this morning, rising up from the valley near the lake, floating notes through my window as I folded my skirts and dresses in their battered cleaner bags. My birding books and apps tell me that…

Visit