Cuckoo land

Val takes a close look at cuckoos and cuckoo flowers

- Val Bourne

IT’S time for the cuckoo, although I’ve never heard one at Spring Cottage in the 16 years that I’ve lived here. To hear one I have to travel to a nearby nature reserve, but it wasn’t always so. In the 1950s cuckoos were ubiquitous and newspapers were full of letters from people claiming to have heard the first cuckoo of spring. When I lived in Northamptonshire in the 1980s, I regularly saw (and heard) two male cuckoos on the telephone wires, see-sawing about like a pair of Dippy Duck toys.

Back then, I thought the cuckoo would be part of my life forever, but that’s sadly not the case. The BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) tells us that we’ve lost more than 40% of our cuckoos in the UK over the past 20 years and they’ve been trying to find out why. A team, led by Chris Hewson, tagged 42 male cuckoos from nine breeding locations in England, Scotland and Wales, between 2011 and 2014. They discovered that cuckoos use two separate routes when they migrate back to the Congo Basin in Africa.