Free Spirits

The cuckoo comes in April,

He sings his song in May,

In leafy June

he changes tune,

In July he flies away.

True?

This year I was walking in the garden when I heard a single, unmistabable ‘cuckoo.’

Collared doves, which sing, ‘Cuckoo coo,’ nest in the conifers, and wood pigeons with their, ‘cuckoo coo cuckoo,’ come for beech nuts; but ‘cuckoo’ is a rare sound these days. I was so surprised I forgot to note when I heard it. It was probably May.

The British Trust for Ornithology managed to trap five cuckoos in East Anglia, and release them with solar-powered tracking devices on their backs. They were amazed to find that the bird they called Clement left for France on 6th June. Two other birds left in the middle of June and one at the end of the month. The fifth bird, Lyster, is still making short forays around his English base in the middle of July. Far from there being an internal cuckoo clock that strikes sometime in July to say, ‘Go,’ the male cuckoos seem to please themselves.

I was brought up to believe that birds don’t have intelligence. They have instincts which they follow mindlessly.

As there is no fixed time for the departure of the cuckoo, there is no fixed route. Clement spent up to a month in wooded regions in France before flying quickly through Spain, across the Mediterranean and into Algeria. He is now over the Sahara on the Algerian-Mauritanian border.

The other three migratory birds flew in a general southeasterly direction. Martin, like Clement, flew to France before continuing to Northern Italy. Chris spent at least a week in the Netherlands, then travelled to Italy through the Moselle region of France. He was last seen in the Po Delta World Heritage Site.

Kasper is the bird who, so far, has shown most stamina. He flew from England to Antwerp, crossed the Alps in eastern Switzerland and was detected on the outskirts of Rome. Then he travelled 1,367 miles SSW to Algeria. He, like Clement, is now in the Sahara.

You have to admire the courage and adaptability of these irresponsible globetrotters. They seem to be truly free spirits until you realise how vulnerable they are. They seem unable to escape the fate that decrees they lay their eggs in the nests of a limited number of not impassive host species. Cuckoos don’t appear to have the option of exercising creativity building nests or inventing more complex songs; and they don’t experience the parental satisfactions of pair bonding, egg incubation and watching fledglings learn to fly.

Still, those of us who visit the BTO website will be keeping our fingers crossed that Clement, Kasper and the others will safely cross the Sahara. We are interested in finding out their final destinations, how they will spend our winter, when they will decide to start next year’s flight north and whether they will choose a different route. No doubt more surprises are in store.