Cuckoo
“Have you heard the cuckoo?”
The cuckoo’s repetitive and 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 woodland, grasslands 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, “No you didn’t”, and walk away without another word.
Genuine cuckoos spend the winter in Western Africa, and the precise seasonal movements of a few individuals are now tracked by satellite. ‘PJ’ has just made it back to Suffolk for his fifth consecutive year, and this spring he took a minibreak on the Isle of Wight.
Although 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, dunnocks and meadow pipits are the favoured unfortunates elsewhere.
These birds don’t know how to tell a baby cuckoo when they’re feeding one that’s three times the size of them. I wonder how the first ‘cuck-oo’ of the Spring sounds to them?
The six-week British Birdsong Essentials course begins on 8 May. This course focuses on equipping you with the skills to recognise more than 25 common resident and summer songbirds, with podcast-style audio lessons, identification support throughout, three group practice / Q&A sessions via Zoom and ongoing access to exclusive online species guides from Birdsong Academy.
There is also the option to include an additional, in-person guided walk in Sussex in early June.
Sign up on the Birdsong Academy website or email me if you’d like to know more.
~ Charlie