These two squirrel cuckoos were shot in Sinaloa 150 years ago today, by the ornithological explorer Andrew Jackson Grayson. Grayson — the would-be Audubon of the West — painted the birds in a way that, alas, makes the reasoning behind the “would-be” portion of the epithet clear.
Grayson was not the first to illustrate this common and widespread species, which had been discovered by European science in northern South America more than a century before Grayson commenced his ill-fated work in Mexico. Jacques-François Artur, royal physician in Cayenne, sent the first specimen to Réaumur, in whose collection it was catalogued by Mathurin Brisson in 1760; there may also have been one, slightly larger, in the cabinet of Mauduyt de la Varenne. Brisson commissioned François-Nicolas Martinet to prepare an engraving of the exotic novum, which he named, logically enough, “le coucou de Cayenne.”
Martinet produced a second, less dramatic portrait of the cuckoo a few years later, for Buffon’s Natural History.
When Buffon and his collaborators came to write the text for the species, they adopted a new name, calling it “le coucou piaye,” borrowing the native American name that would later be pressed into formal nomenclatural service. But, they added, they could not carry over
the superstition that has given the bird that name: “piaye” in the native language of Cayenne means “devil,” and also “priest,” such that among these idolaters the name refers to the minister or messenger of the devil. This is why, they say, the natives and even the blacks find its flesh repugnant….
This rather startling story (with its richly suggestive “even”) is not found in Brisson, and the Natural History provides no citation to its source. A bit of reading around, however, traces the poor cuckoo’s demonic reputation all the way back to the sixteenth century.
Francisco Hernández introduced his patrons and colleagues back in Spain to an American bird known as the Quapachtototl:
When this bird sings, it imitates laughter, and for this reason it is considered by the natives a bird of ill omen.
Just why the sound of giggles, otherwise so innocent, should have been deemed so sinister would be explained in Eusebius Nieremberg’s 1635 “edition” of Hernández’s Mexican zoology. Nieremberg heads the account with what has all the hallmarks of a proverb or, more likely, the superscriptio of an emblem:
Saepe non secura laetitia,
translated later in the century by Willughby as “mirth is often insecure.” This bird is not just demonic, it’s deceptive.
Modern ornithology isn’t certain, and probably can’t be certain, that this laughing cuckoo and the squirrel cuckoo were actually the same species. But I for one will never look at a squirrel cuckoo the same way again.
