confused cuckoos

Subject: confused cuckoos
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 May 08 - 07:52 AM

Last year I heard a Cuckoo doing a minor third,I have just now heard a Cuckoo doing an interval of a fourth with a hiccup at the end.
Whats happening to the [major third] Cuckoo[have they been mixing with foreign Cuckoos].,is their musical purity being compromised,have they been listening to world music ?

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 13 May 08 - 09:39 AM

No, they have been listening to American cuckoos performing pop/rap.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: TheSnail
Date: 13 May 08 - 09:51 AM

All Cuckoos are foreign. They are economic migrants who come over here to take advantage of the better child rearing facilities.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 May 08 - 10:04 AM

Snail nice one,where is wav?Dick Miles

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 13 May 08 - 11:16 AM

But the cuckoo is a pretty bird, it warbles (in a traditional, unnacompanied, top-line melody sort of way) as it flies....

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: beardedbruce
Date: 13 May 08 - 11:18 AM

oh the cuckoo (oh the cuckoo)
she's a pretty bird (she's a pretty bird)
she wore holes, as she flies
she never says cuckoo
till the fourth day of July

jack of diamonds (jack of diamonds)
jack of diamonds (jack of diamonds)
I know you, from old
you've robbed my poor pockets
of my silver and my gold

my horses ain't hungry
they won't eat your hay
I'll ride them a little further
I'll feed them along the way

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: beardedbruce
Date: 13 May 08 - 11:20 AM

it is NOT my fault that some lyric lists are more amusing than accurate.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Newport Boy
Date: 13 May 08 - 11:35 AM

It's long been observed that the cuckoo changes its tune. The hiccup at the end is fairly typical.

Many an old rhyme describes the Cuckoo's time in Britain:

In April I open my bill
In May I sing night and day
In June I change my tune
In July far far I fly
In August away I must

I know it's only May - probably another sign of climate change.

Phil

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 May 08 - 12:24 PM

I expect he is out there with his recorder,teaching the Cuckoos to sing the English way.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Splott Man
Date: 13 May 08 - 12:42 PM

One year I missed the first cuck and only heard the -oo. From then on I only heard oo(long gap)cuck(very short gap)oo(long gap) etc. Iit threw my whole summer out of synch.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Kevin Sheils
Date: 13 May 08 - 01:13 PM

You're trapped in the mad world of Billy Bennett, Author and Chemist, I'm afraid Splott Man.

"You wound the cuckoo clock backwards
So now it goes "oo" before it cucks"

To quote from Christmas Day in the Cookhouse.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: An Buachaill Caol Dubh
Date: 13 May 08 - 02:20 PM

As long as you don't hear the Cuckoo at Christmas, you're all right. Irish readers will understand.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 13 May 08 - 06:03 PM

We heard a cuckoo in the grounds of Gaunts House (Doret) on Bank Holiday Monday last week. It stopped after "cuck"....

Kitty

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 13 May 08 - 06:04 PM

That should have been Dorset, not Doret....

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: GUEST
Date: 14 May 08 - 05:29 PM

"The cuckoo comes of mid-March
And cucks of mid-April
And gans away of midsummer month
When the corn begins to fill"

~Northumbrian saying

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 14 May 08 - 05:34 PM

In Dorset that would be 'the cuckoo comes in April, she sings her song in May. The month of June, she'll change her tune, July she flies away.'

There were several cuckoos to be heard in St Alphage church, Greenwich, London last Saturday. Not one of our best pieces, nor Mr Rutters I'm afraid.

LTS

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 15 May 08 - 08:51 AM

Irish Travellers believe(d) that if you heard the first cuckoo predominantly with your right ear, you'd have a good year.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: MartinRyan
Date: 15 May 08 - 08:57 AM

Jim

Must have been muslim?

Regards

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 15 May 08 - 11:02 AM

I know of two kinds of cuckoo.

The European cuckoo goes cuck-oo. I've heard them. Those of you who have heard variants on that may have heard young birds still learning or may have heard some other bird imitating a cuckoo. A starling, for example, may imitate other birds.

In my neighbordhood, the cardinals are beautiful singers. Sometimes they give a call of cheer-cheer-cheer. Then a starling comes along and goes cheer-cheer-smack! (Like certain pop singers, it can emit a high note but it can't end it gracefully.)

The American cuckoo justs makes a 'gluck' sound.

Perhaps if all Americans bought cuckoo clocks and left the windows open, American cuckoos would start imitating the clocks. Just a suggestion...

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: GUEST,Lindsay In Wales
Date: 15 May 08 - 11:52 AM

I have not heard a cuckoo here in South Wales for about 5 years. Anyone know wny?

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Fergie
Date: 15 May 08 - 04:26 PM

Lindsay

Have you checked the battery in your hearing aid?

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: MartinRyan
Date: 15 May 08 - 05:23 PM

Fergie

Some years ago, I was involved in the early days of a project to conserve corncrakes on the Shannon callows. I remember one of the fieldworkers describing how she stood on the callow near Clonmacnoise chatting to an old farmer who lamented that he "hadn't heard a corncrake for years!" As he spoke, she could hear at least three birds calling. He was telling the truth, of course - he just couldn't hear the sound!

Mind you, cuckoos are actually pretty quiet. If there's much background noise, it's easy to miss them.

Regard
p.s. we used to locate corncrakes using a toy directional microphone. It made it easier to separate echos and bounces. Nowadays you wouldn't need one - there's too few to confuse you!

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: The Sandman
Date: 15 May 08 - 06:05 PM

I believe Cuckoos are on the decline.as I understand it,they alwayas return to the same area and the same species of host bird.Iknow that one of the host birds Meadow pipit is in decline.here is more on the subject.Where have all the cuckoos gone?

One of our favourite birds may be in terminal decline. Simon Birch investigates

Thursday, 29 March 2007

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If you're planning a trip to the countryside over the coming weeks and are hoping to hear the first cuckoo of spring, be prepared to be disappointed. The bad news is that the bird whose evocative call has traditionally heralded the end of winter, and that has inspired poets and composers for generations, is rapidly disappearing from Britain's hedgerows and woodlands.


What growing numbers of birdwatchers have increasingly suspected has been confirmed in figures released by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), which show that cuckoo numbers have plummeted by almost 60 per cent over the past 30 years.

"I've been monitoring the arrival of cuckoos back from their African wintering grounds at the Aylesbury sewage treatment works in Buckinghamshire for almost 40 years," says BTO researcher David Glue. "But two years ago was the first year, that I didn't see or hear a cuckoo at that site and the same thing happened last year. It's very sad that we're losing one of our most charismatic birds."

Graham Madge from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is equally concerned. "We have been alarmed for some time about the cuckoo's fall in numbers over the last three decades," he says. "For such a familiar bird to be in so much trouble is extremely worrying." Indeed, such is the crisis in cuckoo numbers that it's expected that the cuckoo will soon be added to the Red List, a register of the UK's most threatened breeding birds.

So just what's causing cuckoo numbers to nosedive so alarmingly? "While there's no easy explanation as to what's going on, the cuckoo's decline is symptomatic of the difficulties that many other birds now face in the UK," says Glue.

One possible factor is the decline of the cuckoo's key host species. The cuckoo is, of course, known as the bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and gets them to raise the young. Although 50 different species of bird are known to have been targeted by cuckoos for this enforced foster-parenting, just three species, the dunnock, meadow pipit and reed warbler, make up over 80 per cent of all foster parents.

However, the numbers of meadow pipits, which in nest in moorland and heaths, have fallen by 40 per cent over the past 30 years. Similarly, dunnocks, which nest in woodland and rural gardens, are down by 40 per cent. Intensive modern farming practices are thought to be responsible for these losses, which have been bad news for other farmland birds such as lapwings and skylarks.

Researchers like David Glue recognise that cuckoo populations, and those of its key foster parents, are declining in tandem. Despite this, "There is no firm evidence to show that they are inextricably linked," says Glue.

The second possible reason behind the disappearance of the cuckoo is a decrease in the number of moths found in the countryside, whose juicy caterpillars are an important source of food for cuckoos returning from warmer shores. "The large black hairy caterpillar of the garden tiger moth is poisonous to all British birds apart from the cuckoo," says Ian Woiwood, principal research scientist at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, Britain's oldest agricultural research station. "Once very common, the numbers of the garden tiger moth have decreased by over 40 per cent in the past 30 years and it's the same for a number of other species of moths."

Woiwood says that our milder and wetter winters could be encouraging the spread of fungi, which are then attacking the overwintering caterpillars. Again, while researchers believe that there is a link between a lack of caterpillars and the decline of the cuckoo, David Glue says that there's a lack of hard evidence linking the two.

Instead, Glue believes that the main reason why the cuckoo is in crisis is to be found not in the UK but thousands of miles away in Africa. "We know that the cuckoo overwinters in East Africa, which is increasingly being hit by drought as a result of climate change and which is making conditions very difficult for both wildlife and people in the region," he says.

Glue points out that there's corroborating evidence for this theory in that other bird species that overwinter in the region, such as sand martins and sedge warblers, are experiencing a similar dramatic decline in numbers, while the marsh warbler and red-backed shrike no longer breed in the UK at all.

So what, if anything, can be done to stop the slide in cuckoo numbers? "The new policy of encouraging wildlife-friendly farming recently introduced by the EU could help improve the habitats of both meadow pipits and dunnock, which in turn would benefit the cuckoo," says Glue.

Much more research is also needed into why cuckoo numbers are falling, and this is where members of the public have a key role to play. "We're asking the public to record when they first heard a cuckoo this spring on the BTO's online bird recording scheme, birdtrack.net, so that we can monitor the arrival and spread of cuckoos across the country," says Glue. Collecting this information is of vital importance for the conservation of the cuckoo, as it allows researchers to build up a picture of what's happening to cuckoo numbers.

Glue used to think that the call of the cuckoo was a welcome harbinger of spring. But now he believes that it's taken on a more pressing role. "The sound of the cuckoo for me is now an ecological alarm bell for the deepening environmental crisis that's happening here in the UK and over in Africa," he says. "It would be a complete tragedy if we were to lose such an important element of the spring soundscape of our gardens and countryside."

A BIRD'S LIFE

* Cuckoos usually arrive in the UK in mid-April

* Female cuckoos lay a single egg in up to 25 other birds' nests each year

* Cuckoo chicks always hatch first and then push the host's egg out of the nest

* The host foster-parents then devote all their efforts to feeding the rapidly growing cuckoo chick

* In flight, the cuckoo resembles a kestrel, making it tricky to identify. The call of the male cuckoo, however, is unmistakeable. If you've never heard one, go to: www.garden-birds.co.uk/Birds/cuckoo.htm#Voice

* To register your first cuckoo of spring go to: www.birdtrack.net
    could it be, that they have been too successful at destroying the other eggs of the host birds,and there are no host birds left to rear them?

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: The Sandman
Date: 15 May 08 - 06:11 PM

and this:href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1855466.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1855466.stm

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: GUEST,LindsayInWales
Date: 15 May 08 - 06:49 PM

Fergie don't be so f***ing patronising.

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: The Sandman
Date: 16 May 08 - 01:51 PM

today, Iheard my minor third cuckoo,he /she was gong fom f natural to d.Dick Miles

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 16 May 08 - 03:12 PM

"Where have all the cuckoos gone?"
Young girls picked them everyone...

Subject: RE: confused cuckoos
From: Tangledwood
Date: 16 May 08 - 07:53 PM

The Channel-billed cuckoo that visits Australia sounds nothing like the British cuckoo. As it migrates from Papua New Guinea maybe it speaks pigeon.