No sign of the cuckoo

SPRING is galloping on. It’s now the second week of May, the week in the year when gardeners in the cold Midlands, where I live, wonder whether the danger of night frosts has passed or if one morning they’ll find the potato shoots have blackened and that they planted out the French bean seedlings a few days too early.

Mon, 11 May, 2015 - 01:00

Dick Warner

Despite the worries, I love this time of year. But I’ve just realised that something is missing. I haven’t heard the cuckoo.

For many years I’ve heard him (of course only the male makes the eponymous call) in late April or early May and occasionally seen him flitting between tall hedgerows, mobbed by angry small birds. But this year, although I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors, this herald of the turning year is absent.

I know that cuckoos are declining in Ireland and that the decline is greatest east of the Shannon. But in some illogical way I didn’t believe that the statistics I read in the birding literature would affect my neck of the woods. I haven’t completely given up hope, but it’s not looking good. The most likely cause for a decline in the number of cuckoos in Ireland is that there has been a recorded decline in the number of meadow pipits.

Some ornithologists blame changing environmental conditions in their wintering grounds in Africa. A variation on this theory is to blame bloodthirsty hunters on their migration route. These theories are suspect. At one time they were put forward as a reason for the declining number of corncrakes but more detailed research showed that it was actually changes in Ireland that were largely responsible. Blaming a decline in cuckoo numbers on something that’s happening in another country is a form of scape-goating.

Most Irish cuckoos spend their winters in the south of the Republic of the Congo (this is Congo-Brazzaville, not to be confused with the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Congo-Kinshasa). I’ve never been there but I believe it is a country relatively unaffected by development, climate change or population growth.

Cuckoos rely on foster parents to raise their offspring. They’re not the only Irish bird to do this. Goldeneye ducks lay eggs in other birds’ nests, the difference is that goldeneyes only lay in the nests of other goldeneyes while cuckoos .There are different races of cuckoos that leave Africa in the spring for different countries in Europe and Asia. Each race specialises in a different host species. They have to in order to develop an egg that looks roughly similar to the ones in the host nest. The race that comes to Ireland specialises in meadow pipits, though they will occasionally lay eggs in the nests of other similar sized birds like reed buntings, robins or yellowhammers.