The call of the cuckoo....

At Epping Forest Burial Park’s Dawn Chorus Walk a few weeks ago there was a cuckoo calling, a gentle and familiar sound heralding of the welcome arrival of spring after the long winter months. The cuckoo has long held a place in British folklore, music and literature, appearing frequently in the poetry of William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others.

Along with many of our native bird species, the cuckoo, which flies to the UK from Africa to breed, is in decline (numbers are down by 44% since 1995) and since 2009 has featured on the IUCN Red List as a threatened species. A decline in numbers is also evident in other African migrants, including the swift, pied flycatcher, turtle dove, wood warbler and garden warbler.

There are many possible reasons, including changes in UK farmland use, human population spread and habitat destruction in Africa, climate change, a growing scarcity of food (such as moth caterpillars), and – in the brood-parasitic cuckoo’s case – a decline in numbers of their host species, such as dunnock and meadow pipit. A number of migrating birds also get shot for sport as they cross over the Mediterranean.

Sadly, unless we can begin to understand the exact reasons for these dwindling population numbers and take relevant action, it might not be long before the call of the cuckoo is no longer heard in our woodlands but becomes merely a part of our collective cultural memory, confined to the pages of literature.