Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo

Very Good hardcover in Good dust jacket. Previous owner's blind stamp on title page. Dust jacket wrinkled at top front edge. Old price sticker on top corner of dust jacket. In recent years, evidence has arisen that migrant bird populations are declining. Birds pour into the Northern Hemisphere each year in a multi-colored, singing cascade: cuckoos, swallows, martins, swifts, turtle doves, warblers, wagtails, wheatears, chats, nightingales, nightjars, thrushes, pipits, and flycatchers. The vanishing of these Old World birds would be not just an environmental loss but a cultural disaster of enormous magnitude, as many of these species have resonated through literature, legends, and folklore for thousands of years. The turtle dove's arrival is announced in the Bible's Song of Solomon; the nightingale sings from Latin poetry to John Keats to a 1940s hit in London's Berkeley Square; the European cuckoo, with its double note that is a perfect musical interval-a minor third-is the source of proverbs in every country of the continent. In Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, Michael McCarthy highlights for the first time the disappearance of these birds which, he points out, are a part of Europe's distinctive cultural furniture, "as much as cathedrals, Latin, olive oil, or wine." He shows how their loss would do devastating damage to the cultural inheritance of us all. With 13 woodcuts.