...
: : : "Tingle, Tingle, Tangle Toes
: : : She's a good fisherman
: : : Catches hens, puts'em inna pens
: : : Wier blier, limber lock
: : : Three geese inna flock
: : : One flew east, One flew west,
: : : One flew over the cuckoo's nest
: : : O-U-T spells out
: : : Goose swoops down and plucks you out.
: : Although this may have nothing to do with the meaning of the nursery rhyme, most European cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests and build no nests of their own. The baby cuckoo is raised by parents of a different species along with their own babies but usually grows more quickly than its non-cuckoo nest-mates and pushes them out to die.
:up:
I think this follows the long/fruitful tradition of nonsense rhymes such as these:
One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead men got up to fight.
One blind man to see fair play,
One dumb man to shout "Hooray" ... etc
or
Tell him to make me a cambric shirt
Without no seams nor needlework ... etc
or
Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today -
I wish that man would go away.
The nonsensical thing here is, as you say, cuckoo's don't normally build nests; there
may be exceptions, but I imagine the anonymous writer of the rhyme chose those words because they thought there was no such thing as a cuckoo's nest.