Standing up for Nature
The author is a proper botanist (see my review of a very different earlier book he co-authored) and he doesn’t live very far away from me – down the Nene Valley in a place where it is probably mostly called the ‘Neen’ whereas up here we call it the ‘Nenn’ but I have never…
There are about 144 cuckoo species across the world including anis, coucals and roadrunners (I love the Greater Roadrunner!). Not all of them, by any means, are brood parasites but understandably that habit features prominently in this book as it is biologically fascinating and leads the Common Cuckoo into many cultural references. The six…
My farmer friend Duncan told me he hadn’t yet heard a Cuckoo this year when I saw him this morning – and I told him that, for the first time since 2014, I’d heard one from the garden. Such are the sharing of bird observations that happen all over and which tend to form a…
I was bathing in bird song again this morning – from about 410am. A Cuckoo sang from 415am – 445am. Probably because it is a low-pitched song it was quite difficult to locate its direction. The sound to which I listened was clearly bouncing off the wall of my own house because that was very…
A Cuckoo called Carlton II has just arrived back in England having spent the last ten months travelling to and from the Congo rainforest, becoming the first of the BTO’s satellite tracked cuckoos to return to this country in 2020. Aided by favourable southerly winds, he completed the last leg of his mammoth journey in…
Surely you know what a Cuckoo sounds like? But how often do you hear them these days, I wonder? They are much rare now, particularly in southern England and I hear them less often than formerly. I’ve only once heard a Cuckoo from my garden and that was in May 2014. Maybe I’m in with…
Tim writes: I thought this was quite a dramatic flight shot of a Cuckoo flying past like a paper dart. I took this one in the Peak District when there were two males chasing each other on the moors. Cuckoos are suffering a massive population nosedive in Britain, but particularly those in England. All British…
Paul writes: Searching for insects is a bit like birding. I have a home patch, life list, year list, etc. I even get to look for Cuckoos. So it was great when I found this bumblebee last week. A lifer on my home patch! It’s a good record as well. Barbut’s Cuckoo Bee (Bombus…
Otherwise known as Lady’s Smock this is one of our most attractive spring flowers, brightening up damp pastures and roadside verges across the country with its subtle pink flower-heads. It usually starts to appear around mid-April, about the same time as the first Cuckoos arrive back from Africa – hence the name. It also…
I’ve spent the last couple of days with the World Land Trust at the BTO HQ in Thetford (thank you! BTO). There was a meeting of partners from across the world (mostly Latin America but also Vietnam, Malaysia, India and Madagascar) and so I was seeing images of Jaguars, Orangutans and a wealth of…