Cuckoo

Cuculus canorus

“Heard the cuckoo?”

The male cuckoo’s repetitive and easily recognisable song, arriving with the flowering of the lady’s smock and the greening of the hawthorn, established it long ago as a staple of seasonal conversation.

The call is easy to describe, and to imitate, and on a still early morning in late April or May its two notes can travel a long way, over the woodlands, heathlands and wetlands that they briefly call home in Britain.

In recent years confusion is perhaps more of a risk than it once was, with the conquest of our rooftops by the collared dove and its three note coo-COO-coo.

This may have contributed to a rise in bogus claims of cuckoo, including in the depths of winter. 

But if someone tells you they’ve heard a cuckoo at Christmas you are perfectly entitled to reply, “I don’t think so, sunshine. Have a look at that pigeon on your guttering.”

Genuine cuckoos spend the winter in Western Africa, and the precise seasonal movements of a few individuals are now tracked by satellite.

Visit the pages of the BTO and you will see, for instance, that ‘Trent’, who was tagged last year in Worcestershire, spent much of the winter in Angola. He’s now on a trajectory back towards England, having departed Africa and arrived in Spain last Thursday.

Although their numbers have declined sharply, and they have disappeared from many parts of England and Wales, cuckoos can still be heard in places where there are a) enough big hairy caterpillars to eat, and b) plenty of small birds with strong parental instincts to be misdirected.

A female cuckoo might lay up 25 eggs individually in different nests in one season.

In wetlands, reed warblers provide the top target, while pied wagtails, dunnocksand meadow pipits are the favoured unfortunates elsewhere.

These host birds don’t seem to know they’re raising a baby cuckoo, even at the point when they’re feeding an insatiable monster that’s many times their own size.

I wonder how the first ‘cuck-oo’ of spring sounds to them?