Cuckoos, Swallows and the Fear of What Will Be

“You wouldn’t know this” he said. From the cab of his blue tractor. We were in lockdown. The first year. So that is where he talked to me from. From the cab to the ground 2 metres. A Social and Agricultural distance. He had reversed the tractor back down the road to talk. “This is the first year since 1976 that I have heard the cuckoo before I saw the swallow. The reason is this. There was a storm on their migration path. A hurricane in the North of France. And their numbers were decimated. I thought you should know.”

He closed the door of the cab and trundled off towards a distant field to tend his cattle.

He did not stop to tell me any of a hundred things he knew I could learn about my farm. That the rushes needed topping, that I had a field that should be cut for hay. What ditches need clearing. I should sow clover now and which kind. I should get Suffolks and cross them with Mountain Sheep.

He stopped to tell me about the swallows and the cuckoos. Because it was important. Something he understood in his heart and bones. The connection between here and there. How far flung places flow into one another through their shared and natural worlds. What happens in the far there shapes our shared here. What we do here shapes there.

His family have farmed here for a hundred years. More. His fields where they border the road are three deep with Hazel and Willow. Old Willows in places. He has been farming this way for a long time for old Willow to take. Birdsong is loud there. Cattle graze rough grass that has not been ploughed. They are in amongst copses of more trees that broach deeper into the patchwork fields. Rough land is given up to what it will be in places. The fields are small. Rimmed with trees three deep. Many have forgotten how to farm this way he told me later. Don’t remember it’s important. But it is important. He is talking of swallow and cuckoos here. But also of a deeper sense of how a person should be in the world. And how a farmer must farm in and with the natural one.

The sound of the cuckoo is something we wait for. We wait for the greening of the grass as Spring seeps slowly into the winter cold earth. We wait for the tree leaf that softens the fringes of a field and flows like a tide over the drumlined hills. We wait for the cotton blossom burst of blackthorn and hawthorn that embroiders the hedgerow with the lacework of it’s flower. And we wait for the cuckoo and the swallow. With a little fear. Because if they do not come we know things are really not alright. Worry they might not come, such is the world we have. That this is the world now. Our world. It is fragile and not certain and catastrophe is in the wind and maybe one summer away. Farmers wait for them, worried, anxious and breathe again when they come – the grass, the blackthorn, the cuckoo and the swallow. They tell us the worst of the winter might be done, and the best is to come, and the world we have always known will turn at least once more. Accustomed to one another and the summer company of each other in the fields, farmer and bird. We fit one another like gloves. Like a spade fits in clay soil. Like a butterfly tongue fits a flowers bell. There is no thought to the matter. But there is much comfort just to be with each other. Famers, fields, cuckoo and swallows. As we always have.

The cuckoo begins it’s journey here in the Congolese forests where it spends the greater part of it’s life. The rainforest. In amongst the canopy of Mahogany and Ebony, shared with Forest Elephants, Hippos, Gorillas, the Cuckoo flits. Feeds. Flies from. It will journey for thousands of miles. There will be stopovers. In National Parks, forests, wetlands and plains. In places where care is taken to preserve a refuge, respite and habitat. In Cameroon, Guinea, Ghana. The cuckoo will cross the Sahara, in a single 50 or 60 hour flight, high above the earth, up to 5km high. More stops. In Morocco maybe. Southern Spain. In France or Italy depending on the route. Stopping here and there in wild places to feed. Rest. Refuel. These pit stop habitats peppered across two hemispheres connect the far flung forests of the Congo Basin to the near flung fields of Roscommon. The health, size, abundance of each habitat connected to each other. Sustaining a common world on the wing between them. Those far flung worlds connected to the nearer here. Each a part of the other.

We heard the cuckoo yesterday. In an alder tree. In a field. Close by a bedraggled thorn hedge where the blackthorn embroided it’s thorny grid with white lace blossom. In the rain. In the hail. In the blazing sun and in the cold of a single Irish Spring Day. We heard the cuckoo. Who had flown so far to be in a field beside where we both know the dunnocks lay. The health of our farms and habitats will fuel it’s time, be the rhthym and ration to it’s breeding. Give strength to it’s wing as it once flies home again.

The farmer understood this. What happens here shapes there. What happens there shapes here. The care we take with both is the force with which we sustain that world, or with which we broker it’s demise. It is important. As he told me. “It’s important to farm like this. People have forgotten. But it is important.”

He trundled down the road to his ragged edged fields once again this year. They will be thick with arcing swallows following the insect thick drift of cattle across his fields. And the cuckoo will sound again in his fields. In mine too. As it did today. Finally. Like a promise of the summer to come.