Have you heard the cuckoo?

I DON’T know how many of our readers have heard the cuckoo. The male's familiar ‘cuck-oo’ call is heard more often than the bird is seen for six weeks or so after its arrival here in late April, writes Tom Gillespie.

In flight, it can be mistaken for a bird of prey such as sparrowhawk, but has rapid wingbeats below the horizontal plane - the wings are not raised above the body.

I have to admit I have never seen one, but last year, at the end of April, while out walking a bog road with colleague Frank Burke, we heard not one but two cuckoo, their distinctive calls echoing across the valley. At first we thought it was an actual echo until we realised the calls were coming from different directions.

We all know they have evolved a very unique approach to rearing their young.

They don’t build a nest and don’t have anything to do with rearing their families.

They lay their eggs in the nests of others species. The eggs are usually the same colour and patterns as those of the host species.

So as not to raise suspicion, the female cuckoo removes one of the other eggs from the ‘foster’ nest. Then, within 10 seconds, she lays an egg. This way, when the host bird returns, she won’t think there are too many eggs in the nest.

The female cuckoo will repeat this 10 to 20 times during the breeding season.

Once hatched, the naked and blind baby cuckoo will push all the other eggs and chicks out of the nest and thereby receives the undivided attention of the poor host bird that spends all summer feeding the enormous and ever-hungry chick.

With no chicks to look after, the adult cuckoos leave Ireland by August and head south at their leisure. The young cuckoos depart in September, leaving behind very exhausted foster parents, a behaviour demonstrating the remarkable quality of innate navigational instincts of the species.

Cuckoos which nest in Europe spend the winter in Africa, usually on savannas. Some birds from the western part of Asia also winter in Europe, others in Asia, up to New Guinea in the Pacific.

In Europe, the population of cuckoos is quite large and stable, although the size of the western European population has dropped in recent times, most notably in France. At this time of year cuckoos are widespread in Ireland, favouring open areas, which hold their main Irish host species, the Meadow Pipit.

Cuckoos are dove-sized birds with ash-grey upper parts and dark-barred white bellies. They are very hard to spot. If you do manage to see one, it will probably appear just as a dark, streamlined shape flying quite fast across fields, often between areas of woodland.

Cuckoos have been declining in Ireland, and they are less common now than they were a few decades ago.

Between 3,000 and 6,000 pairs visit Ireland each year, usually is the second half of April, the earliest arrival being April 2.

The cuckoo eats insects, mostly caterpillars and beetles. The bird does not specialise in particular species of prey, but catches the insects which are most numerous in its local area, and therefore easiest to find and catch.

Another species which baffled me was a jackdaw-like bird that I saw while walking on Keel beach in Achill. It turned out to be a chough and can be found along the west coast.

Marginally larger than the familiar jackdaw, at 40 cm in length, in many respects the chough looks like a typical all-black crow.

At close range, however, its unique long, down-curved red bill and bright red legs make identification easy. They have a distinctive ‘key-aww’ call.

The Irish name of this species translates as ‘red-legged jackdaw’. Choughs also have more prominently ‘fingered’ flight-feathers than our other crows, giving them a distinctive silhouette in the air.

Amongst our most accomplished aerobatic fliers, choughs frequently swoop and soar in updrafts around cliffs, seemingly often just for fun.

So skilled are these natural stunt pilots that they will sometimes even fly upside down, perform barrel rolls, etcetera.

They nest in caves or crevices along coasts, or, less frequently, in old buildings.

They feeds mostly on insects and their larvae, worms and other subterranean invertebrates, using their curved bills to dig them out of the soil. They will also eat berries, grain, small mammals and birds and, in true crow fashion, pretty much anything else they can find.

One species I would delight in seeing again is the lapwing, a very characteristic bird of the agricultural landscape during both the winter and the breeding season when 2,000 to 5,000 pairs occur throughout Ireland.

BirdWatch Ireland are again appealing for help in a nationwide survey of breeding lapwing.

The survey, now in its second year having been kicked off in 2019 with funding from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, aims to continue collecting observations of breeding lapwing from citizen scientists around the country.

Lapwing, like many other ground nesting species in Ireland, has undergone severe declines in breeding numbers: the most recent Bird Atlas reported a 53 per cent decrease in its breeding range in Ireland in the last 40 years.

As a result of these serious and ongoing declines, the lapwing is now red-listed on the Birds of Conservation Concern in Ireland list and has been highlighted as a conservation priority in the government’s Prioritised Action Framework 2014-2020.

* Read Tom Gillespie's 'A Mayo Outlook' in our print edition every Tuesday