I was fortunate to have several encounters with the common cuckoo, at Murlough’s nature reserve recently. It’s a place that holds a lot of resonance for me having spent a summer working there in 1987 as a temporary warden. That summer was an important hiatus at an uncertain period of my life. I had been bitterly disappointed by getting a 2ii in my degree (many years later I found out that I missed the doors-opening 2i by a single mark); and I felt entirely disorientated in terms of what the future held for me. My late mother, god bless her, having spent much of my childhood trying to distract me away from my love of the natural world, responded to my “failure”, with the then-devastating remark that “animals ruined Mary”. It seemed the larger world agreed with her, and all I wanted to do was flee my original passion. Murlough didn’t let me. I don’t remember much about that summer except walking the dunes, and watching the badger sett. But it was enough to keep me at least tentatively in touch with my deepest self.

In those long-ago days, I could never have imagined that I would end up with a PhD in ornithology; and that I would become a contributor to The Guardian’s Country Diary. So the fact that my latest contribution on the cuckoo made the Guardian’s Home Page – a first for me!

Also, and as ever vital, was the guidance of editor Paul Fleckney, who reads the room of the Guardian’s readership far better than I do. When my original draft rather too gleefully celebrated the cuckoo’s brood parasitism, Paul gently but firmly guided me to a more acceptable way of putting it. Indeed, as many of the comments show, there’s a lot of people still uncomfortable with that evolved strategy – although the cuckoo can no more help how natural selection has shaped its reproductive strategy than can any other species. And that this has led to a process of such chance and complexity is still a wonder to me. Besides, the cuckoo is a beautiful bird, with an utterly captivating voice; and it was wonderful not only to hear it, but also to get some great sightings – many more than I could fit into the column. One that will live in my mind is the sight of that self-same cuckoo taking off and flying over the high dunes, still calling, with a retinue of suspicious passerines, mainly meadow pipits, in tow.

Anyway, as I was drafting the piece I couldn’t help but think of Stephen Colton, who on the 6th of May last year sent me a short recording of a cuckoo calling near Drumquin in Co Tyrone. It was his last message to me. Stephen was the nature contributor to The Irish News, and I had read him for years before I got to know him personally for an all-too brief period of time. Had I known in those long-ago days when I was wandering the Murlough dune heathland – still reeling from what I perceived to be the end of all my dreams – that he was my cousin’s cousin, that we were, essentially, related, I wonder what a difference that might have made to me? He was 10 years older than me, but he was a connection that might have helped me know that I wasn’t the only person in my wider family who was interested in birds. Alas, it was only in the last year of his life that I found out about that; and got to know him, all too briefly. It’s funny to grieve someone you scarcely knew, but I do grieve Stephen hard. I feel the loss of what never was; what never had the chance to be. I feel the loss that I will never walk with him to see hen harriers as he promised me. And all the knowledge, particularly of the Irish language and birds that is now gone with him.

But there is something apt that moves in the universe all the same. When Paul commissioned the piece on the cuckoo, of course I thought of Stephen. I remembered his cuckoo calling. I remembered his kindness and his generosity, and I hope that somewhere he might have been with me, as I watched and listened to the Murlough cuckoo.

My Country Diary on the cuckoo was published yesterday, the day after Stephen’s first anniversary on the 14th May. It is dedicated to him.