This year I set myself the task of finding a 'Cuckoo's Nest. The first thing to note is that this is a complete misnomer as the nest does not in anyway shape or form belong to the Cuckoo, it is the property of the host species of course, be it Dunnock, Reed Warbler or Meadow Pipit. So with this difficult task in hand, and at Will the Warden's suggestion I bought a copy of Nick Davies' brilliant book Cuckoo, Cheating by Nature! This lead me to watching the ground-braeking footage from the early 1920's of a female laying her egg in a Pipit's ground nest.
Reading the book and watching more more up to date videos I began to realise that although the task was never going to be easy, it was over the next couple of months acheivable with time and planning.
On each of my initial Nightingale Walks, on the 18th at Northward Hill and last Thursday at Cliffe Pools we heard not only the walk's subject, but Cuckoo, so I know they're back from their epic journey fron Sub-Saharan Africa.
Today, I went out on the marsh at Cliffe, accompanied by the very amiable and knowledgeable Alice McCloud, one of the new interns, to sus out the plastic situation on the River Thames tide-line.
Driving along the track, stopping occasionally to survey the plastic over the wall, a Cuckoo flew from over the wall, alighting on a bramble about 25 yards ahead it was very quickly chased off by a Meadow Pipit, only to circle on the marsh and return to almost the same spot. Alice managed to get a pretty reasonable shot of it. This is behaviour I'd not witnessed before!
That is:- not sitting high up in a tree cuckoo-ing, not flying from one high tree to another a couple of hundred yards away, I was rather hoping it could be a female looking for a host nest. Looking at Alice's images its' very difficult to determine the sex of the bird, but I'm guessing on the behaviour it was a female which gave me a twinge of hope as to achieving my goal!
Thanks to Alice for the images.
The North Kent Marshes are a very special area and worth preserving at all cost.