EndangeRed: Fading songs of the cuckoo

The song of the cuckoo that heralds spring may soon be lost - Image from The Telegraph

There are lots of species that are threatened and are on the endangered list but one would never expect the common cuckoo to be one of them. Well, cuckoos in Britain may soon come on the endangered list as their numbers have dropped by almost 59% since the 1960s. They are now so rare that they could come on the Red List of endangered birds within a month. Their numbers have dropped in a large part due to global warming.

Flocks of cuckoos fly an amazing 6000 miles every year from the UK to Africa to breed and roost. But climate change is making their tedious journey even harder and more so because food and water sources in Africa are drying up. The cuckoo is the only parasitic breeding bird in Europe, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests, but now only around 10,000 to 20,000 breeding pairs arrive in the UK each year according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

Read more about the cuckoo

Watch a video of cuckoos