Kitchen Garden Forum

For the first time in ages and ages I heard a cuckoo today - At first I couldn't believe that it wasn't a dove but it was definitely a cuckoo!

I heard my first of the year just a few days ago here too.

In fact there is one out there now really giving it some

Snap, one heard here today too Gallotments. Yes, I was nearly fooled a week ago, doves can sound similar

Not heard one here yet. We went to Italy last year and a cuckoo drove us mad continuously calling for hours on end. But I love to hear them in the UK. Though I do feel sorry for the eggs that they have chucked out to lay their own. I listened to a program on channel 4 recently and they explained how the cuckoo watches several nests at a time and has to lay an egg in a very short time scale when the birds are out of the nest. They even make the eggs match the host nest. Incredible.

Heard one last Wednesday in deepest Dorset.

Nothing in Ambridge yet.
I guess Kenton and Jolene have other things on their minds at the moment - do they have cuckoos in Monte Carlo?

John

We had a pair of cuckoos chatting across our fields at the weekend!

Got one calling here this morning, perhaps they bred well last year as the little birds apparently did quite well.

I seem to remember that we didn't hear one last year. I wonder if that bodes ill for this year as I seem to remember reading somewhere that the young birds return to the birth location. If that is true, we may possibly have lost our local cuckoo for ever, which would be very sad, unless there is more than one of them local to our area. Does anybody know what their lifespan is?

Apparently cuckoos are on the RSPB red list.

According to a list of maximum lifespans for birds http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/age.htm a cuckoo can live for 12.9 years but I guess that is a lucky one and I don't know how accurate the site is.

And today the first swallows that I have seen on the allotment site

Yesterday as I pulled up at lottie there was a cuckoo on the plot just mooching around. He / She flew off up into the tree but had long enough to really see how pretty they actually are. Was pretty cool!

Westi