Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo - Michael McCarthy

‘If we could see it as a whole, if they all arrived in a single flock, say, and they came in the day instead of at night, 16 million birds. How other than with wonder could we view the sight of 16 million swallows, martins, swifts, warblers, wagtails, wheatears, cuckoos, nightingales, nightjars, thrushes, pipits and flycatchers pouring into Britain from sub-Saharan Africa? They would cover the sky from horizon to horizon. It would be the greatest of all natural spectacles.’ So prize winning environmental journalist Michael McCarthy begins this beautiful book, with an ode to the ‘Spring-Bringers’ or as he also calls this amazing natural event, ‘The Great Arrival.’

In his second chapter, he explains why he embarked on a book about migrant summer birds; it was because he felt that no one had ever appeared to have grasped quite what they gave us as a group. Different birds have been admired individually through the ages, but the wonder of the whole phenomenon, on the scale of say The Gulf Stream had passed us all by.

He devotes chapters to several of these individual species of birds and as a journalist, rather than a scientist, he is happy to interview and give credit to several experts in the field.

McMurphy is in thrall to his subject and amongst several poetic descriptions of searches for song birds in the wilds, I particularly enjoyed his chapters on warblers and the search for and eventual discovery of the rare wood warbler on an RSPB reserve in Wales with Director of Conservation, Mark Cocker. The wood warbler is a bird with two distinct songs. Describing one, the author writes, ‘As I watched, it dropped its wings to its sides, threw back its head with its lemon throat to the sky, opened its beak, and gave its trill, its-string-of-beads-on-a-wooden-floor trill, shivering its whole being as it did so.’

‘The Wandering Voice’ is McMurphy’s name for that most enigmatic of birds, the cuckoo. He goes into fascinating depth on what has been learn about the cuckoo. How they time the laying of an egg when the host bid is away, how different species of cuckoo manage to lay mimetic eggs of different colours according to the colour of eggs in the host nest. How it is the cuckoo chick who ejects the host eggs because a bird will never abandon a single chick. How the cuck-oo..can be transcribed in musical notation.

Sadly, the book ends with ‘The Vanishings’, how songbird numbers including those of the cuckoo are dropping drastically. The book was published as long ago as 2009. And things will have changed since that time but he reports that over the period from 1967 to 2007, cuckoos had declined in Britain by 59 percent. The picture is the same across the bird population and in some species much worse, and also across Europe.

He blames the European Common Agricultural Policy , which rewarded farmers with its subsidies for producing food and tempted them to turn their fields into factories - increasing pesticide use, ripping out hedges, the replacement of old wildflower meadows etc. But migrant birds not only face obstacles in their European summer breeding grounds but also in their arduous migratory journey and also in the change of habitat and climate in their wintering non breeding grounds. Unexpectedly, another problem, this time for woodland nesting birds is the increase in the deer population in our woods who trample and graze on the birds habitats.

So the book does not end on a happy note but the author celebrates the fact that he had a chance to enjoy these birds in the company of committed naturalists and it remains to be seen whether he would write further more encouraging chapters now that that we are more aware of the value of regenerative farming and the preservation of wildlife.

However, I am grateful to this gifted writer for opening this reader’s eyes to the glory of the Spring Bringers.

Sue Hoar