91Èȱ¬

At last, I’ve caught up with many of you who’ve seen your first cuckoo. Mine was not here in Shropshire but 200 miles away at 4 o’clock in the morning on Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire. Slightly traumatised at being up that time in the morning, I was waiting for the dawn chorus walk to assemble outside the visitor centre at Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve when the cuckoo‘s call burst from the darkness.

Wicken Fen is a special place of birds, an oasis of wild life in a shrunken, beaten land which once was endless fen but now stinks of harvested leeks. I spent the day, from dawn till dusk, wandering the reed beds and scrub, along lodes - the canal-like waterways, and droves - paths through the fen. And although the place was full of birds I wanted to see - marsh harrier, hobby, woodcock, reed bunting - I've never seen so many cuckoos in one place.
As I was watching one cuckoo, firing its crossbow-like form across the sky to land in a willow, another cuckoo shot out of the tree across the fen. There were no bubbling cries of female cuckoos but the male calls came from every direction. Apparently more are expected to arrive and one of the reasons for this is the abundance of their ‘host’ species, reed warbler.
Despite a strong, cold wind, all the warblers were in fine voice: grasshopper warblers that sound like fishing reels, the creaking phrases of reed warblers, sharp flint-napping notes of willow warblers and the explosive charge of cettis warblers from low scrub. But the explanations for why these songs have so much power - breeding, territory etc - don’t seem to capture the effect their construction of an aural landscape has on us. And that seems particularly true of the cuckoo. I heard my first cuckoo at dawn and the last one at dusk, so that’s my fix and I now feel that spring is real and the world still works. Lets hope they return to my patch in Shropshire and yours too, if they haven’t arrived yet.

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