Where Cuckoos Call by Des Hunt Page A

hardly slept that night. There was a morepork calling near the house and I kept thinking it was after Bigmouth. It was even worse when the calling stopped, because then I knew the morepork was hunting or maybe eating her.
    I didn’t see Bigmouth at all during the next week. I assumedshe had left and that made me sad. Yet I knew it had to happen. She was a wild animal and the right place for her was in the bush with other shining cuckoos, not in the messy bedroom of some crazy twelve-year-old.
    Just when I had come to accept that she’d gone, Bigmouth turned up again. This time it was in the scrub down by Treetops. And she was not alone. There was a group of five cuckoos feeding and calling in the manuka.
    I rushed back to the house to get some worms, but the cuckoos had gone when I got back. However, they returned the next day, and Bigmouth left the others and came over for a feed. From then on she would spend some of her day in or around Treetops. I left a window open so she was free to come and go as she wished.
    By then it was nearly autumn and I knew that our time together would soon end. This is because cuckoos are migratory birds, and come April she would have to follow her instincts and fly away to spend the winter on a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. I convinced myself that it was a good thing. To her I was no different from the warblers or any other bird that provided food. I was just something to be used until you could look after yourself.

Chapter 8
    While the summer had been wet, it had not been windy. Wind is the enemy of all birds, especially those that nest in the sand. The wind-blown sand can cover their eggs and even bury nesting birds. Worse still is the effect that wind can have on the sea. The waves formed by strong onshore winds can travel a long way above high tide, drowning eggs and chicks.
    Tropical cyclone Nellie hit on 22 March. The TV news had tracked it moving south past the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and on into the seas of New Zealand. Until then, the eye of the storm had been at sea and there had been little damage. As it neared us, the cyclone was downgraded to a tropical depression, which meant that the winds in the middle might be less but the effects would cover a bigger area.
    I had been worried about the thing right from the start. It was the time of the year when the migrating birds would be heading back north and the last thing they needed was a major storm—especially Bigmouth who hardly looked big enough to cope with any wind.
    Luckily the storm was at its worst at low tide, so the waves were not as damaging as they could have been. Even so, sea water swept over the spit turning the low parts into large foam-covered lakes. As there were no nests at that time, the only lasting damage was the destruction of the spinifex plants.
    The stream flooded and, with the help of the sea, washed out its bank, exposing the roots of the nearby kahikatea. Much more damage like that and the tree would die.
    It was only in the morning that I saw all of this. As so often happens with these storms, by morning the weather had changed to a glorious day—blue skies and little wind. The waves were still huge, curling and then breaking in an explosion of sound.Rubbish was all over the beach, some of it washed down from the bush, and other stuff brought in from the sea. I stopped at one water-soaked log that was covered in goose barnacles. The creatures moved around on their long necks, opening and closing like things out of one of the Alien movies. Peg didn’t know what to make of them. She would push her nose forward until one moved, and then she’d jump away. I laughed at her and she doesn’t like that, so I had to cuddle her until we were friends again.
    My worries about Bigmouth were soon put to rest. No sooner had I started cleaning up Treetops than I heard her tseeoo call. She flitted in the window as if nothing had changed. Somehow, water had got into the