Cuckoo

There have been a few letters in The Times recently about cuckoos. Someone heard his first cuckoo in spring sounding off not on two notes but on four. Someone else, writing later, put forward the idea that if the first three notes were in a certain key and the last sound was in some lower key then the song might well have been the bird equivalwent of the opening bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony. Someone today mentioned the cuckoo singing in a minor key and another said his sang in a minor third on arrival but "slipping to a perfect fourth before departing to Southern climes".
Until a few years back, I had always had good thoughts about the cuckoo and his song: it brings certain romantic notions of Spring to mind and, of course, the music associated with the bird - Delius's "On Hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring", Mahler's First Symphony, Haydn's Toy Symphony and isn't there a passage in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony?
Ah yes, the beautiful sound of the cuckoo heralding the birth of a new Spring - and all that!
I even recall being told in Primary school when I was about 8 years old how the young cuckoo managed to get rid of the other bird's eggs by booting them out of the nest it had been laid in. Fascinating, I thought. We all smiled at the thought.
Then, a couple of years ago, I saw a nature film on TV and witnessed how the adult cuckoo laid her eggs in other bird's nests, some of them quite small birds, and buggered off leaving them to be fed by the other birds. It was a horror film as I watched how the adult birds had to feed this interloper until they practically dropped off their perches, how this big monster of a bird pushed the others out so that only he was being fed. Indeed it truly was a horror film ranking with "Psycho" or "The Chainsaw Massacre" (?). They were just stories, this was real. And, folks, it's happening while we sit and listen with rapture to Delius or Mahler. What's the RSPCA doing about it I want to know?