Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

Thirty years ago up to 35,000 pairs were found in Britain and Ireland. Fifteen years later the number had dropped by 5,000 pairs.

Today it has dropped again by the same amount to 20,000 pairs at the very most. It may well be much less this year.

When I began my long-term monitoring of all breeding birds in West Dean Wood and also Kingley Vale 44 years ago, each of these two Sussex habitats comprising coppice woods and yew forest respectively contained two pairs of cuckoos each. I even recorded three singing males in these 40 acres of coppice woods 30 years ago.

Today there are no cuckoos in either place.

There are several problems facing cuckoos. One is that host parents such as meadow pipit and dunnock have also declined because of agricultural changes and the huge numbers of cats (seven million) in British gardens.

Cuckoos have used 100 different hosts to brood their eggs and rear their young, throughout Europe.

Fifty species of host have been used in Britain. Together with reed warbler, the meadow pipit and dunnock rear 80 per cent of young cuckoos.

Other problems facing the cuckoo is the drought in north-east Africa where it spends the winter.

Other species affected by the Somalian and Ethiopian droughts are lesser whitethroat, wood warbler, marsh warbler (now down to 25 breeding pairs in Britain) and red-backed shrike, which is probably extinct here.

In the past, poets have feasted upon the cuckoo's declamatory presence, celebrating this odd but iconic bird.

Gerard Manley Hopkins called Oxford city 'Cuckoo-echoing' in 1879. Not today.

In Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare declared the cuckoo to be 'on every tree, mocks married men' .

Thomas Hardy said in 1922, "This is the weather the cuckoo likes, and so do I."

In 1595, Edmund Spenser wrote: "The merry cuckoo, messenger of spring, his trumpet shrill hath thrice already sounded", while Wordsworth in 1807 called the cuckoo 'Blithe new-comer' and wondered if it was really a bird or the wandering voice of a spirit.

Poor old WH Davies was only too aware of passing health, time, and everything else that makes life liveable in 1914, writing: "A rainbow and a cuckoo's song, may never come together again: may never come this side the tomb."

Let us hope we shall be more fortunate and it won't be a silent spring.

This was first published on April 16 in the West Sussex Gazette. To read it first, buy the West Sussex Gazette every Wednesday.