Donal Hickey: Listening for the first sounds of the cuckoo?
The cuckoo generally arrives in mid-April, though we have at least three reports of it being here last month.
It’s the time of year when people keep an ear out for the cuckoo’s distinctive call. But it can be mistaken for the sound of other birds.
The cuckoo generally arrives in mid-April, though we have at least three reports of it being here last month. There was a cuckoo on Cape Clear Island, West Cork, in mid-March, though it wasn’t calling, while a cuckoo was heard on Heir Island, on March 18.
A reader in Cork city thinks he heard the cuckoo at about 7am, around March 23/24. The sound came from the built-up Ballinlough and Boreenmanna Road areas. Unusual territory for the cuckoo which we associate with rural and remote areas.
“Might it be that he had arrived from afar and stopped for a rest before continuing to suitable territory,’’ the reader suggests. “I heard it for maybe ten seconds, a stop, and another second or two. That was it.’’ Tom Lynch, of Clare Birdwatch, is a long-time and keen observer and he thinks the early “cuckoo’’ in Cork was either a collared dove or a wood pigeon.
“This is a common mistake. In my own experience, it’s usually collared dove, which has three notes, people mix up with the cuckoo. The cuckoo has only two notes and they travel much further than the collared dove and the wood pigeon, which has five notes,’’ he says.
Anything is possible with birds. A few years ago, a cuckoo was reportedly photographed in the Dingle Peninsula, in October, when it should have been in Africa.
Swallows are definitely here, by the way. I saw them performing aerial acrobatics and chattering noisily outside Killarney, Co Kerry, on Easter Sunday, April 4. Not the first sighting, however. A few hundred were seen over the High Road, on Cape Clear, on March 30.
Given that swallows are found nesting in familiar barns and sheds, year after year, people wonder if the same birds return to exactly the same nesting sites.
Studies show that, yes, most swallows come back to the same place, with almost half of the pairs again using the same nest. According to Rob Robinson, associate director of research at the British Trust for Ornithology, this is remarkable given the length of a swallow’s journey from its wintering grounds in South Africa.
As with most things in nature, there is, of course, a practical reason for this continued usage. Building the mud nests takes much time, and hard work. Mr Robinson says a single nest can call for an average of 1,300 trips to gather enough pellets of material.
And, after going to all that bother, not to mention having travelled 10,000km, isn’t it only sensible to return to last year’s nest.
