the coucou is a pretty bird/she warbles as she flies/I'm preaching the word of god/I'm putting out your eyes

So I was walking along Pembroke Street, where Mary Poppin's author used to live, towards Liverpool Road, when I heard the insistent repeated cry of a bird. It was just an arm's length away in the shrubbery near the corner, a buttery yellow and grey, barred and checked bird that was already bigger than its parents. Who were two more or less frantic red wattle birds:


real busy getting insects to drop into the maw of this mad cuckoo that would not let up, not for a moment ... a relative cuckoo, the pallid, is known as the brain fever bird because of this demented insistence. I was impressed to see the struggle for survival going on so close that it seemed I could literally have reached out and plucked cuckoo or cuckoo-ed parents from the branch, if I'd wished. Later, like, now, I've checked the images and it seems that what I saw was a fledging Common Koel:


which goes about in plaid while adolescent before adopting (but not entirely) sober blue-black as its adult livery. It too, as an adult, has an insistent cry, often I hear it before dawn and sometimes deep in the heart of the summer night. As if the rage for existence knew no relief.

(this post probably belongs in dérives, however, there's some kind of analogy with the real & fake de Chiricos, below, which is why ... I pursue it here.)