Yeah, I was thinking that the Cuckoo looks like a cross between Baby Huey and Terrytoons' Gandy Goose -- and as a character it has less appeal than either of them.

In my opinion, the best part of the whole cartoon was when the weasel started beating up the cuckoo. Can't blame the brave little sparrow for valiantly saving his "half-brother," but it was certainly wasted kindness on his behalf.

Yep. My TL;DR post below sums up as: cuckoos are Not Nice, and the cartoon pretty much stuck to that!

Anyone who would label your post as TL:DR either doesn't have a high school diploma, or they don't deserve the one they've got.

Awwww. Well, I was more thinking about my little trivia bit at the end, and the fact that, after all, this is a journal, not an ornithologist class.

This might be unique among classic cartoons in being almost completely faithful to the actual bird's life...within the limits of what you were allowed to show at the time, anyway.

Hatchling (European) cuckoos have a groove on their back. The first thing they do when they hatch is use that groove as a scoop, and push out all the other eggs and nestlings, so they get to be the sole one fed. Nothing good happens to the things that get chucked out; they either get eaten by predators or starve.

What happened to our poor little sparrow hatchie? He got starved, then pushed out of his nest, then promptly picked up by a nasty old weasel. At least things ended a little better for him then in nature, but sadly, it makes complete sense that the Baby Huey cuckoo would be a Karma Houdini.

(And one bit of trivia: American cuckoos -the Black-Billed and the Yellow-Billed - have far better manners. They make their own nests and eat really nasty pests, like tent caterpillars, that most birds won't touch with a ten foot bill. Sadly, nobody's going to make a cartoon about them!)

I actually liked how this cartoon took it - the cuckoo didn't develop any sort of a change of heart. He saved the sparrow by accident, and the sparrow knew it. The way the cartoon was going, though, I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the cuckoo ate the weasel!

Really, though, the cuckoo is easy to please - just keep him well fed. Once the sparrow figured that out (and figured out how to keep himself fed at the same time - no mean feat!) they'd probably become friends by default. At least, he'd have a built-in bodyguard - anything that gets between Mr. Cuckoo and his next meal would promptly get steamrollered.

I'm not sure about them being "good pals" -- more like they were just playing their parts in the band and ignoring each other.

The weasel, on the other paw, became far more civilized and sympathetic (especially since he'd learned how to control his drooling).

It reminded me of a book I once read called The Heart of the Valley, except that the unfortunate host birds were dunnocks, or wood sparrows rather than hedge sparrows. Even though the cartoon was drawn in a manner that was intended to be humorous, the plight of the baby sparrow was all too similar to one of the fledgelings in that book. (Another fledgeling was even less fortunate -- the cuckoo pushed it out of the nest and it died soon after it hit the ground.) European cuckoos are nasty birds, indeed!

I'll have to take a good look at that book; I'm always interested in natural history (or fictional natural history, like Watership Down), and I know precious little about the U.K.'s actual birds.

It's really too bad that both common American cuckoos only live east of the Rockies. I've had the privilege of meeting both of them in my forest walks - they are very shy, mellifluous birds of wood and hedgerow and always a treat to actually see.

I actually do wish they'd get a mention in a cartoon, simply because they're such helpful birds and very few people know anything about them; were I to make a Black-Billed or Yellow-Billed character, the closest analogy I can come up with is that they'd be helpful forest hermits, even if you'd never want to eat what they routinely eat!

You're probably already aware of this, but for the benefits of other readers who may not know, the real-life Roadrunner is a type of cuckoo!

You know what, Frenata? I didn't know that! It normally doesn't come up as one of the cuckoo family when you look through bird guides for "American cuckoos" but that's a fault of the bird guides (and me!). Doesn't help I've never seen an actual roadrunner...that would be a life bird for me.

So I guess you can say that an American cuckoo got quite a bit of cartoon screen time...far more then the nasty European cuckoo did. Karma.

I'll leave you with a bit of a long post, but it's an excerpt from one of my favorite bird books, written by a North Carolina nature columnists named Jack Aulis. From Eagles Have Bad Breath, This is what he had to say about American cuckoos:

"Are cuckoos really cuckoo? Well, they are a bit odd. The cuckoo is really a recluse. The females lay their eggs on piles of twigs, and on haphazard schedules. And cuckoos eat caterpillars, especially tent caterpillars, that most birds wouldn't touch with a tree fork. [...]

[...] The egg-laying of the female cuckoo is what you would have to call casual. It may continue on and off for so long a period that a newly hatched cuckoo can find himself sharing the nest with a freshly laid egg.

That may be a trifle eccentric, but it is hardly what you call crazy. All the female cuckoo really needs is an egg timer or - so to speak - a cuckoo clock."

There are some lovely backgrounds in this piece!