Keeping track of our cuckoos

Satellite tags are being fitted to cuckoos to find out more about what happens to them once they leave the UK. “Our cuckoos are in trouble,” said Paul Stancliffe of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). “Since 1967 we have lost three-quarters of our breeding cuckoos and we are not sure why. If we are to pull together a conservation strategy we need to understand its whole life-cycle.”

Victor was one of six cuckoos tagged by the BTO. “Once he had found and successfully mated with at least one female cuckoo his job was done,” said Stancliffe. “Victor only stayed here for four weeks before heading back to Africa.”

Only male cuckoos have been tagged previously but new, lightweight tags – weighing just 2g – mean that female cuckoos will be followed for the first time this year on their way to winter quarters in the Congo rainforests. They can be followed at www.bto.org/cuckoos.

An appeal has been launched by the BTO to raise funds to tag a further 10 birds next spring. Each satellite costs £3,000, not including the cost of satellite time.

Another bird faring badly is the nightingale, with numbers falling by 90% over the past 50 years. The appeal will help scientists at the BTO analyse information on nightingales collected from data from counts and geolocator tracking. “Some of the questions that we hope to answer are where local extinctions have occurred, which habitats have seen the greatest losses and where nightingales spend time outside of the UK,” said Stancliffe.