"Wren and Cuckoo" Illustration

I got married when passed the age for starting a family so I have no experience about parenting except occasionally helping to look after other people's kids but I do wonder if for many it feels a bit like how this wren must feel. Forever putting in the effort and stuffing food into its mouth for the reward of having to do it all over again. I know the rewards go far beyond this and are real and palpable but I wonder just how many worms my parents had to find for me. And I probably was not very grateful even if they had melted cheese on them.

I did this illustration just after getting my first ever chance of seeing a cuckoo chick and surrogate parents at work. It was in Thailand and involved a koel (type of large cuckoo) and pied starlings which are very busy birds with a no-nonsense character. The starlings are not small but that cuckoo chick could have swallowed them whole. For several weeks after the chick left the nest I new exactly where it was thanks to its loud rasping begging call that sounded a bit like somebody using a buzzsaw two doors down.

The gape of the chick was so wide that it could not see what was being shoved into its mouth. And the "parents" always did so as quickly as possible before the cavernous mouth slammed shut on them. The other striking thing I noticed was that along with the noise and the red gape the chick would shake its head quite violently whenever one of the starlings got close with food in its beak. It started to get on my nerves and I was glad when they slowly moved further away.

This got me thinking about my native UK and the fact that I only ever managed to get brief glimpses of adult birds. And now they have declined so in some parts of the country even hearing their distinctive call has become rare. This illustration is my version of what I might have seen in my younger days if I had been luckier and put the effort in, although I don't think wrens are the most common host species.

I intend to try to illustrate what I saw with the koel and starlings but I'm a bit daunted about getting the full horror of it all!

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