Afterword

Last year I heard my first cuckoo on 27th April, this year it was the 29th. I was listening to a radio programme recently when the presenter, a middle-aged lady, said that she had never heard a cuckoo, the nearest to it being in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. It made me think about what we have lost, since I am sure that she is not alone and this quintessential sound of spring, taken for granted for generations, is now rarely heard and in some parts of the country people never hear its familiar call. Cuckoo populations in England have declined by an estimated 65% since the early nineteen-eighties, less so in both Scotland and Wales. The lives of migratory birds are complex and it is therefore difficult to point to a single cause for this decline but ornithologists have noted that autumn droughts in Spain, through which cuckoos pass on their way to Africa, have depleted insect populations at a time when the birds most need them to replenish fat reserves. This results in higher mortalities on the migration route. To add to this habitat loss in this country and also dwindling populations of host birds gives the cuckoo fewer opportunities to interpolate their eggs into nests. Cuckoos are in danger of passing into folk mythology.

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