In the morning, I heard the cuckoo chirping in the distance.
Cuckoos are more afraid of people, usually do not enter the residential area, generally do not fly to the village, its call, mostly from a distance from the air.
The scientific name of the cuckoo is cuckoo.
There are many types of rhododendrons, including large cuckoos, four-voiced rhododendrons, eight-voiced rhododendrons, middle cuckoos, small cuckoos, eagle cuckoos and so on. The big cuckoo is two cuckoos, its call is relatively monotonous, that is, continuous "cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo", not hurried, not hurried, sounds very gentle, only from the speed of speech can not hear the meaning of the urge to sow the valley.
The cuckoo mentioned in ancient Chinese poetry is the four-voiced cuckoo, and this bird also has names such as ZiGui and Du Yu. Because the color of the mullage epithelium and tongue of the four-voiced cuckoo is bright red, when it is called, the ancients thought that it was crying blood; after the blood flowed to the ground, it became a fiery red rhododendron. Thus, the word rhododendron refers to two things at the same time: a cuckoo bird and a rhododendron.
Ancient poets also used to put the two together and chant. The Southern Tang Dynasty poet Cheng Yanxiong wrote the relationship between the two most clearly: "Rhododendrons and birds, complain about the two he credit; all are blood in the mouth, dripping into flowers on the branches." Li Bai's poem reads: "The Shu kingdom once heard birds, and Xuancheng also saw azaleas." One called one ileum and one broken, three springs and three months remember three bars. "One of the sub-rules is the rhododendron bird, Li Bai saw the azaleas in Xuancheng, and naturally associated with the sub-rules birds of Shudi, which shows that in Li Bai's time, this flower and the bird may have the same name."
But Yang Wanli of the Song Dynasty did not think that the azaleas were stained with the blood of the cuckoo birds, he said: "What is the life of weeping dew and crying red?" Off-value cuckoo sound when open. How much blood can be in the mouth of the cuckoo, I am afraid that it is a sign of tears. "To the effect: How do rhododendrons dripping with dew and red tears come about? It's just that when it blooms, the cuckoo birds are there. How much blood can be in the mouth of a cuckoo bird? The color of the rhododendron is probably dyed by countless tears. Qiu Jin, the heroine of Jian Hu, also has a poem that writes both at the same time: "The azalea flowers make a cuckoo cry, like blood like Zhu Yiqi." It should be that the spring cannot be retained, and the wind and dew in the middle of the night are also cold. "In this poem, there is a sword qi.
Another name for Cuckoo is Du Yu. The name comes from a legend in the ancient Shu kingdom. The founding king of the ancient Shu kingdom was named Du Yu. After he helped King Wu to cut down the silk, he called him Emperor Yushu and called him Emperor Wang. In his later years, a great flood occurred in Shudi, and his turtle spirit made a great contribution to the control of water. In order to express his gratitude to the turtle spirit, Du Yu gave up the throne and transformed himself into a bird. Every spring, they would not stop crying, calling people to "hurry up and cuckoo", and when the Shu people heard it, they said, "This is the soul of our emperor Wang", so they called the bird a cuckoo, which means that Du Yu became a cuckoo. Li Shangyin's famous poem "Zhuang Sheng Xiao dreamed of butterflies, looking forward to emperor Chun Xin to entrust cuckoos", said this allusion.
The four cuckoos chirp "gū-gū-gū-gù", these four syllables have given many different meanings to people in ancient and modern China and abroad.
To English speakers, it sounds like "one more bottle" or "brain-fever," or meningitis. Some places directly call this bird "brain-fever bird", which makes people can't help but be funny.
To Chinese speakers, its cries are like "It's better to go home", "Bare sticks are bitter", "Quickly sow the valley", "Cut the valley quickly". In this way, the four cuckoos are given the meaning of resentment and urging people to sow seeds.
Some people say that the Hakka people listen to these four words as "slippery brother porridge". I also feel fresh about this statement. In order to verify, today I specially consulted a Hakka friend and asked her to pronounce the four words "slippery brother porridge" in Hakka dialect. The friend further introduced that the Hakka called catfish "Slippery Brother", and the porridge cooked with catfish peeled and sliced was very delicious. This shows that "slippery porridge" is a real diet in the life of hakka people. No wonder the Hakka people will listen to these four words.
The Hakka were Han Chinese who migrated to the south from the Central Plains such as Henan and Shanxi during the Qin Dynasty, the last years of the Western Jin Dynasty, the last years of the Tang Dynasty, and the last years of the Southern Song Dynasty. Hakka dialect is one of the seven major dialects of China, and it is generally believed that the inheritance relationship between it and Middle Chinese is more obvious. Reciting Tang poems and Song poems in Hakka is much more consistent in terms of rhyme than reading them in Mandarin. The Hakka words contain the legacy of the Han people in the Yellow River Basin in the Tang and Song Dynasties. From this point of view, the four syllables of "slippery brother porridge" emitted by the four cuckoos are quite ancient.
But I asked the Hakka friend if the pronunciation of the four words "better to go home" in Hakka dialect was the same as "slippery porridge", and she said it was different. There is no "better to go home" in Hakka, and she has never said these four words; I forced her to read, and she read it with some hesitation and difficulty. It is no wonder that after the Hakka people moved south, the Hakka dialect has been highly integrated with the dialects of Min, Cantonese, Gan and other dialects, and many of the rhymes in the Central Plains have been left in the long history of the Qin, Han, Tang and Song dynasties. "It is better to go home", maybe it is just the sound of birds heard by the Han people in the north.
It is said that Cantonese speakers listen to the cuckoo's cries like "the mother-in-law beat me". It just so happened that my Hakka friend was still Cantonese, so I asked her to say these four words in Cantonese. She said it and sent it to me via WeChat voice, and when I listened, it was close to the sound of four cuckoos.
The four cuckoos chirp is actually quite good, maybe it's a musical sound. British naturalist Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selpen, mentioned that his neighbors tested three cuckoo calls, one in D key, two in D major, and three in C key.
I don't know music, and I haven't done similar tests, but I feel that birds that sound good like cuckoos, thrushes, and kingfishers can call chords. Sparrows, flower magpies, and gray magpies can only make noise.
As for what the bird's cry really means, I am afraid that only the human birds themselves know, and what we humans sound like is nothing more than our human chiseling. For example, this morning, I heard the sound of dripping water: "As long as you can make trouble, you are like this, you are, forget it." "It's all about these syllables coming back and forth. But I know that this is not what people say at all.
How nice it would be if one could understand bird language like Confucius's son-in-law Gongyechang. Then, as soon as one stops in the woods, one can know what the birds are saying. Now, people are living in the belly of the bird with a human heart, and they are not in the right place.
Birds like the oak cuckoo rarely whisper, and they talk to each other very loudly. At this point, the sparrow is even more so, as if everything is discussed openly, looking for a partner, getting angry, or who has an opinion on whom, all out loud.
It seems that the birds have no privacy, rarely play conspiracies, and are always frank and innocent. They don't seem to have laws, and all actions are allowed, so there's no need to hide or play tricks. For example, a small bird has just caught a bug, and the big bird sees it and directly flies around to grab it. No bird thinks there is anything wrong with this, and no bird comes out to do justice and fight injustice. Even if one bird kills several birds, no other bird will punish it. Sometimes birds who do bad things are not only not punished, but also get benefits, so that doing bad things can even become a tradition.
The cuckoo is actually a bird that has loved to do bad things for generations.
Cuckoos are nesting parasitic birds. According to some statistics, one-third of cuckoos do not feed their children themselves, but lay eggs in the nests of birds such as thrushes, robins, and reed warblers, and ask others to raise them. She would run to someone else's nest to lay an egg while other birds were out. As soon as the little cuckoo is born, he will first peck other eggs, or push other eggs and newborn birds out of the nest and enjoy the feeding of his adoptive mother. Because it will soon grow very large, it needs food equivalent to the total amount of three or four young birds born to its adoptive mother, so it must ensure that the adoptive mother will not raise other children except herself. And the poor adoptive mother, who was originally thin and small, had to fight for her old life to find enough food for this adopted son. She was tired of all the price she paid for her own intelligence: at first she had a different egg in her nest and she couldn't see it, and then she saw that her child didn't look like herself at all and didn't think about it, her own child was murdered by her adopted son without knowing it, so she raised the murderer in such a confused way, and she was still tired like a grandson.
Sometimes it feels like the world of birds is as simple as a bird's mind.
Birds would be puzzled if they had seen the tediousness of affairs in the human world. They certainly think that man is the least efficient creature to do things. Most of the time, people are used to climb, to start a business, to make money, to be famous, to slander. Why not go to a meal when you are hungry like them, and when you are finished, you go to the sun, cool off, straighten out the feathers, and talk about birds?
Birds are not like humans, they have to worry about where they come from, but also worry about where they go, and when they face the present, they have to attack, kill, fight, cheat, envy and bully, and there is no moment of stopping. Birds appeared earlier than humans, and they have a longer history on Earth than humans. But no birds care about history, no birds care about the future, and in this sense, they are all animals living in the present, the most Buddha-like.
