The first day of May, and my first cuckoo in seven years, its voice full and sonorous with sex as it seeks a mate as a prelude to its mayhem in some other species' kindergarten. The cuckoo holds no place in the hearts of those with whom it winters - just another obscure brown bird amid a brilliantly flashing sub-Saharan aviary. But there is barely a culture in Europe that does not hold the cuckoo dear; for all its deplorable domestic habits, its sound is the peal of summer, across a sun-baked noontime meadow or across a midnight woodland.
What does the cuckoo make of Ireland when it arrives from a continent where trees bloom in rainbow promiscuity? The large flowers it sees here almost all blossom in yellow, aureate or orange. This year the primroses have been quite sumptuous, great garlands of gold spreading along earthbanks and hedgerows. Their primula cousins, the cowlslip and the loose-strife, do not seem to be so abundant; but what they hold in common is their tenacious dominion of the gold end of the spectrum, alongside all the common plants at this time of year.
Colour of summer
Gaze into any field, and what do you see? Dandelions, rape, ragwort, buttercup, hawkweed, nipplewort, sow-thistle, coltsfoot, daffodil and yellow rattle: the colour of the Irish countryside in early summer is yellow-gold; and of course there is gorse, pursuing its strange strategy of flowering throughout the year. What does it get by expending all that energy unremittingly, with its brilliant banks of gold, creating islands of banana-pineapple fragrance? It seeds only in late summer; why does it go to the trouble of flowering throughout the year? No other plant is so wanton in its folly, yet few are so successful in their empires.
In the days when people used to picnic, gorsebrakes were popular places for the hamper and the flask and that moral depravity, the primus, promising so much, and invariably yielding a vile petroleum brew, like the skimmings from the Kuwaiti seas. Gorse provided shelter and the illusion of warmth on even cool days and, moreover, the assurance of modesty when the call of nature proved irresistible. It is a kindly plant, the gorse, and it kept its secrets well.
Like the majority of its competitors, it flowers in gold. Even the daisy's heart is yellow. Why is this? Smaller flowers, such as the forget-me-not, might opt for blue, and the gentian for mauve, but the colour of most successful species of blossoms lies around a wavelength of 5.850/10-7 metres, the upper ranges of yellow.
Seducing the bee
Flowers do not choose their colours because of fashion; the most successful plants flower in gold because that way they seduce and suborn their pollinators; presumably bees. Which suggests that the bee cannot see colours of lower wavelength, and that in the absence of a bee-seducing smell, pansies and forget-me-nots and bluebells and speedwells must depend on other, non-bee insects for pollination.
Our countryside is therefore defined largely by the tiny focus of the bee's eye. What it does not see, it will not pollinate, saving a powerful smell to draw it to an otherwise unpropitious colour, such as the purple buddleia. Plants do not choose the colours; bees do, and those flowers which cater to the habits of the hive, pandering to the bees's ocular preferences, will therefore be the most successful.
No-one declares that the bees' preference for gold is a mark of intelligence or wisdom. They simply do not see colours other than those for which they are programmed; and if they have a consciousness at all, it is no more than the mind of the hive, in which moods are swiftly generated and instantly spread. And when bees are beset by strange humours, it can be a truly dreadful business, as they sting wantonly even though the deed kills them more surely than the creature they are attacking. There is no strategy for survival here, merely an expression of the occasional irrationality of existence.
How different are we from bees? How adept are we at seeing and comprehending that which we are not initially programmed to perceive? We laud ourselves in the Republic over our new-found liberalism, and our tolerance. But to tolerate something, you must see it; you must be fully aware that it is there, and in that seeing, in that awareness, accept that it so. The bee does not "tolerate" the blue flower; she simply doesn't see it.
Separated brethren
And we must conclude that we were not, despite the existence of the orange on the tricolour flying over Leinster House, prepared to have orange sashes on the streets beneath it. We have gold in our fields but not in our streets. The orange we are at ease with is the one we cannot see, a theoretical pigment which we discuss vaguely in the abstract. But clearly, we want to know nothing about its reality; we either portray Orangemen as capering, bigoted buffoons, or as a separated brethren over whom some magic wand will one day wave and they will see the error of their ways.
It wasn't much of a challenge, to have an Orange march in Dublin, it really wasn't. But, led by the hiveminds of Sinn Fein-IRA, the streets of the capital have been closed to those of a different hue. The cuckoo is here, and summer has arrived. And, oh yes, what else happens in Ireland at this time of year?