A Celebration of the Extraordinary Life of the Cuckoo

It is an April dawn and the cuckoo has just arrived in Forncett. He is breathless having flown from his home in the Congo rain forests all the way to Forncett St Mary. He flew through a night and a day, another night and day anda third night on the wing while crossing the vast and desolate Sahara at its widest point, flying high, sometimes 5 kilometres up. Now a few weeks later he is back in Norfolk. 

The people of Forncett have great claim to celebrate and protect the cuckoo because the masterpiece of medieval music ‘Summer is icumen in” surely echoes the voice of the Forncett cuckoo. A monk at Reading Abbey in the early thirteenth century, John of Fornsete, was born here, and, is believed to have composed this beautiful six part round. He would have been deeply familiar with the cuckoo’s voice calling from the water meadows of the Tas that we walk in today. The music celebrates the bird as harbinger of Spring and the coming of Summer.

We see the cuckoo rarely but we hear the distinctive call issuing from leafy trees and thickets floating on the damp air across the shallow river valley; clear notes with the extraordinary quality of the ventriloquist, here and then far, a woodwind note of marvellous simplicity. He calls for a mate and the female cuckoos reply with a bright liquid bubbling on a descending scale.

In Forncett the cuckoo, we urgently hope,still finds the emerging hairy caterpillars of the poplar and elephant hawk moths, the buff-tip, the oak Eggar and the Lappet, all becoming rare. The cuckoo must get strong and plump again for its return journey to the Congo, where it lives companionably with the lowland gorillas.

It will never build a nest, it will lay its eggs in the nests of other birds and it will never raise its own offspring; that will be done by the unknowing birds it has tricked. There are distinct races of cuckoo, each specialising in laying a particular egg that mimics those of the host. In Norfolk this may be a meadow pipit, a reed warbler or a dunnock. During May to June the female cuckoo lays up to twenty-five eggs, each in a different nest across meadows and woodland margins, but of the same bird host. If she is a reed warbler specialist she will lay her greenish spotted eggs only in reed-warbler nests.

The host bird is on the alert and if they detect a cuckoo egg they pierce its shell and throw it from the nest. But the cuckoo is subtle and watches the nest patiently, often in the afternoon when she knows the host will leave to feed. She dives down and lays her egg fast into the nest. She also eats the egg that the foster bird has laid to give her own room. The strategy takes eight seconds and she may utter a ‘chuckle’ similar to a sparrowhawk, diverting the nesting bird from noticing the alien egg.

Cuckoos hatch quickly and they heave out any host chicks or eggs so they get all the food brought by their unknowing ‘foster parents’. They mimic the begging call of the chick but five times as loud to sound like a whole brood.

Most cuckoo parents leave the UK in June. The young cuckoos when fully fledged fly alone to Africa, never knowing their parents, guided by the night sky and the earth’s magnetic field.

The British Trust for Ornithology’s amazing cuckoo tracking project, using satellite tags on male cuckoos,is helping us to understand why English cuckoos are in such desperate decline that we may never hear their beautiful call echoing over Forncett again.

Norfolk cuckoos fly south-west via Spain when they leave England in June. South-west Europe now experiences more drought because of climate change with shorter periods of intense cold, wildfires, long lasting summer heat and habitat destruction. During their perilous migration cuckoos may not find enough insects to give them strength to cross the Sahara.

UK birds are breeding earlier and when the cuckoos arrive from Africa they may have lost their chance to lay in the host birds nests. Scottish and Welsh cuckoos however, go south-east through Italy, Greece and the Balkans and when returning in April they fatten up on the estuary of the River Po, a more successful route.

Here in Norfolk the cuckoo’s habitat is desperately depleted and making sure that our water meadows and woodland fringes are maintained and nurtured rather than disrupted and eroded is vital for their survival, as it is for reed buntings and meadow pipits.

REFERENCES

Countryfile

The Curious Life of the Cuckoo, Lewis Stempel, 2025, Penguin Books

 

April 2026