Birding in June 2011

What is happening to our Cuckoos? I recently talked with our church members and friends and only three of them had heard the cuckoo. Ben Hall was the first at Lower Lea Bailey on the 18th April, the other hearings on the Ross Golf course a few days later. As a boy, summer seemed to be dominated by the call of the cuckoo. Even 15 years ago the Cuckoo was singing. Now the hedgerows and woods around Weston are practically cuckoo-less. What has happened? The experts blame the Sahara. It is getting so large, apparently, that the cuckoo no longer has the wing power to get across and the Africans are destroying all the wintering habitat of the cuckoo and so fewer cuckoos return to us. However on talking to a Swedish friend of ours they have been inundated by cuckoos this year in northern Sweden 'maybe too many' she said. So according to the experts, British breeding cuckoos find the Sahara too wide to cross, but their cousins in Sweden do not. So who is going cuckoo, the experts or us? Only time will tell.

I feel what cuckoos need to make their summer visit a success is food, suitable habitat and birds to dupe. Many garden, farmland and woodland birds are in decline, as are butterflies the producers of the cuckoo snack, the caterpillar, so the cuckoo has fewer hosts and less food. Maybe it's our human lifestyle that's the major causational factor. It's all about insects really. If our planting provides them with food and habitat, then birds will follow.

D.H.