Mary Medlicott, Storyteller and Author - Storyworks

Storytelling Starters ~ The Road Home

This week I’ve been struck once again by the continuing tale of the cuckoo. The tale is told in serial form in regular blogs from the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology). What enables it to be told at all is the electronic tag. By tracking a small group of selected cuckoos on their annual migrations, these tags are helping scientists to establish what particular difficulties are contributing to the marked decline in cuckoo numbers in Britain. The cuckoo whose tracking I’ve helped support by contributing a small sum of sponsorship money is one that has been called Lloyd. He’s one of the cuckoos from my native Wales.

But it wasn’t Lloyd who became the centre of attention in this week’s BTO blog. It was one of the English tagged cuckoos called Chris.

The Cuckoo’s Tale

Early on Thursday morning this week, while I was still fast asleep, Chris the cuckoo was settling down on the slope of a hill in the High Atlas plateau in northern Algeria. From data received on his tag, the place where he’d arrived appeared to be a shallow slope covered with juniper trees. Only three hours earlier, he’d still been in active migration, flying north on a flight of 2000 miles from the Digya National Park in Ghana where, this year, he’d gone to complete his preparations for crossing the great Sahara desert.

By the BTO’s calculations, Chris had made that flight of 2000 miles from Ghana in less than 60 hours and at an average straight-line ground speed of 35 mph. In so doing, he’d become the first of the tagged cuckoos this year to get to this stage of the annual journey.

Like the other tagged cuckoos, Chris had spent the winter in central Africa and then, after starting his migration back to Britain, he’d gone to Ghana to feed himself up for his Sahara crossing. This year, like last year, he’d reached the north side of the desert on almost exactly the same date – 4 April this year versus 5 April last year. Last year, too, he’d headed towards exactly the same spot and, once arriving, had not lingered there long. Only two days later, he was on the wing again, making his way across the Mediterranean to Italy.

So now we wonder how things will work out this year. When will he set out over the Mediterranean? Will he make it safely to Europe? And will he get home to England – though, of course in the case of a cuckoo one has to ask where home is? Is it in England where he will breed? Or is it in Africa where he spends the winter? Or is a cuckoo’s home in the air on the wing?

The Road Home

I’ve been thinking about why I find it so moving to hear about the cuckoos’ journeys. I don’t think it’s only because they are such a mystery and miracle of nature, though that is striking enough. Journeys, I conclude, are also important to us as human beings because they are symbolic. They evoke our imagination.

And in the case of the cuckoo, my empathetic imagination feels acutely the enormity of what has been undertaken, acutely admiring the bravery of one tiny creature that on so long a journey manages itself so miraculously and with such apparent foreknowledge that on the way it makes sure to go to a place where, by stocking up with food, it can prepare itself for overcoming the difficulties inherent in the crossing of a massive desert.

The cuckoo’s journey also makes me think about our own homing instincts as humans. These are so much a part of story, traditional and personal, all over the world. Many, many traditional stories tell us how someone goes on a journey and comes back after the quest, usually with deepened experience. Going home represents a widely-shared urge for completing the sense that there’s a cycle to our lives. So deep is this urge, and so common that we easily notice the difference when there’s a departure from it – as in the case of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the widely-loved writer who died this week aged 85. She’d grown up in Europe, lived a whole chunk of her life in India (she’d married an Indian) but then, aware how much she also loved America, she had afterwards moved to New York which is where she died.

Or not?

I suppose variations from the pattern have the effect of emphasising the pattern. For many years, my next-door neighbour in London was a Jamaican, a builder by trade, who intended that one day he’d do up his house (where he didn’t actually spend much time). When he’d finished the house, he told me, he’d sell it and use the proceeds to go back to live in Jamaica.

He took his time with his plan. One day, scaffolding went up at the back of the house. But long after it was erected, it stayed up, remaining there for a full 16 years during which time it became a regular resting place for the local animal life, cats and squirrels and birds. And in the end, what happened? After finally deciding to finish the house, our Jamaican neighbour sold it as planned. So far as I know, however, he still hasn’t gone back to Jamaica. He’d become so thoroughly rooted in London. Besides, as he once admitted after a short trip back home, Jamaica now felt too hot.

This week’s photos

Migration patterns? Even as I was preparing this Blog yesterday, I was on a train back home to where I grew up in Wales. In a week’s time I’ll be back in London. Meantime, my pictures this week are some of my local Welsh views:  

the chimney and tree I see from my bedroom window

one of the local sheep

the shed roof where birds frequently come to peck at the moss

and the view from the road out of the village

See you next week!

 

 

 

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