Folklore of the cuckoo bird
Legend has it that at the end of the Zhou Dynasty, Du Yu, the king of Shu, ceded the throne to the heroes who eliminated the flood, and he himself lived in seclusion in the Western Mountains and taught the people to farm. After his death, he transformed into a sub-standard bird (that is, a cuckoo bird, also known as a cuckoo, also known as a duyu bird), and every spring, he issued a "cuckoo" and "fast cuckoo" to remind people to sow seeds in time.
Its all-night cry, its desolate lament, makes people feel sad and reverie, because the cuckoo's oral epithelium and tongue are red, it looks like it is overworked, "crying" and bleeding from its mouth.
Every spring, cuckoos make noises to remind people to sow seeds in time
The cuckoo bird of the poet's pen
For a long time, there have been many tragic poems of "cuckoo crying blood" and "crying blood deep resentment". For example:
In the "Pipa Line" by the great Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi, "What did Dan Twilight smell in the meantime?" Cuckoos cry blood apes", meaning, "What sounds are heard here from morning to night?" The cuckoo's bloody cry and the ape's mournful cry."
In the Qing Dynasty Cao Xueqin, in the "Funeral Flower Yin" of the masterpiece "Dream of the Red Chamber", she wrote that "the cuckoo is speechless at dusk, and the lotus hoe returns to cover the heavy door", describing the sad scene of "the cuckoo is sad and silent at dusk".
Li Shangyin, another great poet of the Tang Dynasty, also wrote a good sentence of "Zhuang Sheng Xiao dream of butterflies, looking forward to the emperor Chun Xin to entrust the cuckoo", Zhuang Zhou longed for the butterfly of freedom and happiness, but entrusted his good wishes to the cuckoo", and here there is also the artistic conception of the cuckoo bird as an auspicious bird.
Ancient poets saw the cuckoo as a sad and auspicious bird
Cuckoo birds in nature
Scholars who do not like poetry evaluate the cuckoo bird as the "most shameless" and "the worst" bird, why is this?
This is related to the characteristics of cuckoo birds incubating offspring. There are about 50 species of cuckoos in the world that lay eggs in other bird nests, and this nest parasitic phenomenon is academically called "incubation parasiticity", which has led to a bad reputation for being "unwilling to raise biological children".
The true characteristics of the cuckoo bird in nature
Usually, adult cuckoo birds will choose passeriformes with similar appearance and habits as hosts, rely on righteous relatives to incubate and brood for themselves, and increase the survival rate of young chicks with different adaptations. At the same time, in order to reduce the risk of being found and abandoned by the host, the cuckoo bird will push the same number of host eggs or young chicks out of the nest, and the cuckoo's young birds will be out of the shell earlier, and other young birds will be killed and incubated by the righteous relatives, while the host's own offspring are difficult to reproduce. Therefore, the cuckoo has also been labeled as a "evil bird".
In order to improve the survival rate of young chicks, the cuckoo bird bears the name of "evil bird"