Cuckoos In Decline? Must Be Climate Change!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Silly Emma Gatten is at it again!
Cuckoos are in peril because they are unable to adjust their clocks to keep pace with climate change, new research has found.
The birds are among several species to migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to European breeding grounds in the spring.
As spring conditions have begun arriving steadily earlier in Europe, most species have adapted their arrival times to ensure they get the best breeding spots and prey.
But cuckoos are remaining in West Africa awaiting the arrival of spring rains, which haven’t shifted their start times, because they bring the invertebrates they eat, researchers from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) have discovered.
The time spent fattening up for the journey is vital to give the birds the energy they need to make the migration to Europe. Cuckoos that do make the journey in time for European spring are found to have higher mortality rates, researchers said.
But arriving late to Europe is also dangerous for cuckoos, as they miss the peak time for caterpillars, their main prey, and are left with the last pick of breeding sites.
The two factors may go some way to explaining why cuckoo numbers have dropped 71 per cent in England since 1995.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/21/cuckoos-climate-change-threat/
According to the Woodland Trust, cuckoos usually arrive in Britain during April. Although Emma may have difficulty in believing this, Aprils in the UK are no hotter now than they were two decades ago. Indeed the cold Aprils we have had recently are much more deadly for the cuckoos:
The Woodland Trust explains the real reason for the decline of the cuckoo:
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/animals/birds/cuckoo/
Maybe Emma might care to do some research first in future, before she rushes to blame non-existent climate change.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Nothing to do with those bird choppers infesting the country and coastal waters then?
Is that not a ‘good thing’ ? Do not cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and when the hatchling cuckoo emerges first it turfs out the other eggs ? That could lead to species loss among the bird population and Emma Gatten would no doubt be wringing her hands over that but attributing it, no doubt, to Climate Change!
Hmmmnn. Methinks a case of ‘Heads they win, tails we lose’. Again.
Correct. Cuckoos are interspecific brood parasites.
She should at least pick a sympathetic species to “save.”
The trouble is that there has been a huge increase in the cuckoo population. They infest DESNZ, OFGEM, CCC and Parliament etc., and turf out people with reasonable views and replace them with their cuckoo alternatives.
What a great comment. how true. We could do with cull of the human kind.
🙂 x10!
“I’m cuckoo for climate change.”
Midwich cuckoos?
and here’s me thinking they laid their eggs in clocks
My Outlook account has just flashed a message that the link to NALOP is “Unsafe” and blocked it, although allowing to override this; first time this has happened and I am deeply suspicious – PH, have you seen this before?
Meanwhile:
“most species have adapted their arrival times to ensure they get the best breeding spots and prey.” – really?
Stay in Brecon Beacons, second week in May – loads of cuckoos cheerfully or chillingly announcing their presence – or arrival – all week, difficult to tell which.
“But arriving late to Europe is also dangerous for cuckoos, as they miss the peak time for caterpillars, their main prey, and are left with the last pick of breeding sites” – picking a breeding site, ie a nest, is not anecdotally an issue for these very forceful creatures?
Off topic
Petition launched for temporary ban on onshore wind projects in Wales
https://nation.cymru/news/petition-launched-for-temporary-ban-on-onshore-wind-projects-in-wales/
‘Research has found…’. Well, I suspect whatever research required to even form a theory about cuckoo clocks – let alone a proof – would take many more years than the climate change scam has been running. My guess is the author(s) needed funding and the CC coffers are besieged with kerb-crawlers.
This is the problem with science in general and the media reporting science. A single paper hasn’t “found” anything until its been replicated/reproduced and thoroughly scrutinised.
There has been more cuckoo calling in this, my northern Dale home, than for several years. I suspect that the reporter is cutting and pasting rather than actually visiting the countryside. Their main target appears to be the Meadow Pipit which nests on the moors close by and the cuckoos are making regular visits to ensure survival of their species, loads of pipits too. Like many birds that are supposed to be declining, eg curlew, black grouse, lapwing, we have forever of them as my late mother used to say!
I’m afraid that most of the DT’s younger reporters just cut and paste from press releases with clearly no understanding of what they are pasting and making no effort to research the topic for different perspectives.
In the past Sub Editors wouldn’t have allowed this and would have forced young reporters to do their jobs properly, but the DT don’t seem to employ these staff now.
Like 186no my computer has suddenly started flashing a malicious site warning for NALPKT. What is behind this invasion of free speech?
I have had no MS updates recently and no other similar warnings from other sites visited; only recent action was clearing out the cache ( which I do periodically ) – otherwise I remain deeply suspicious.
Silly Emma Gatten is simply regurgitating what she has read in the British Journal of Ornithology. It seems that modern journalists are not required to check their facts.
The CET Temperatures for England show that that spring temperatures were much warmer over the last 100 years and its only summer temperatures that have been warmer, and that is mainly due to Urban heat effect.
This is incoherent. If cuckoos arriving early have higher mortality rates then the cuckoos arriving later must have lower mortality rates. So arriving later is better. IIt’snonsensical to say “both” contribute to the decline. There’s no baseline.
And if the rains in West Africa aren’t arriving early…?
For the first time in more than a decade we heard a Cuckoo loud, clear and nearby on St Bernard’s Mount in Leicestershire on 7/6/23.
Hi Paul, having trouble accessing your website — perhaps the Russians are blocking it?
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Visiting this website might not be safe.
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Thanks Charles.
The link works fine on Firefox.
Is it just that one post that is blocked?
Just this subject/post originally for me…..so far.
chrome is ok
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Anybody that argues there is a problem simply by picking a date and saying there has been a decline in a particular bird species since then is being stupid. Bird populations rise and fall naturally, often in a boom and bust fashion.
Also, these stories are sometimes based on an inflated bird population that came about from the activities of man, farming, and other landscape changes, and unnatural food sources/abundance.
I’ve never heard so many cuckoos as this year, here in N Wales.
I am 68 yo, I was born in 1955 I remember the Winter of 1963 and the Summer of 1976 as two extremes of weather. However I cannot say that I have seen any change or trend that indicates that climate is changing!
No doubt the doom-mongers will point out that this is a subjective observation, which I agree is the case. However the fact remains that I have lived in the UK for all of my life apart from three years of living in Southern Spain, where we were told that climate change would lead to desertification of this region, (it hasnât!).
I totally agree that fossil fuels are being used faster than they are being created and are therefore a finite source of power, however the predicted climate disaster has not happened and is increasingly unlikely to occur!
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Funn, because this year I’ve heard more cuckoos that I can recall for the last 30. I’m in North Bedfordshire. We’ve also seen an increase in kites, larks, owls and birds of prey in the time I’ve lived here.
One commenter got it in one “When are the DT going to realise that they have a cuckoo as an environment editor.”
Never mind Cuckoos, unfortunate for the bird specifies they like to prey on, they are still around, I heard them in May. Let’s talk about the fate of the Curlew, once upon a time this bird liked to nest in areas where wind turbines have been installed. As a consequence the Curlew no longer nests here, prior to the erection of turbines its distinctive call was common in the evenings.
https://bsg-ecology.com/are-breeding-eurasian-curlew-numenius-arquata-displaced-by-wind-energy-developments/
how are cuckoos not extinct?. If they are apparently dying out due to the small change in climate and seasonal timings that allegedly are happening now, how come they have survived the much more drastic changes that have taken place over the last couple of millenia?
I heard lots of cuckoos in April this year, as usual. If anything I thought they were a little early, which surprised me, given how cold it was this spring.
Sounds like the Cuckoos have been watching The Big Lebowski. As the Dude once said, “I’m not really into time, man.”
That was on Cheech & Chong’s Big Bambu: “How ’bout you, hippie… you wana buy a watch?” “Aw, no man, I’m not into time.”
Cuckoo numbers are increasing to the north and west of a line running from roughly the Humber to Bristol Channel and decreasing to the south and east. Is this due to climate change?
Any paper or report on species decline submitted to a “scientific” journal has to mention climate change as a possible cause to increase the chances it’ll be published then picked up by the MSM.
I wonder how the cuckoos ever survived the last glacial period, with the enormous changes in locations and temperatures involved? They must have been pretty adaptable.
I have booked your seat on the next bus to the indoctrination camp. You display a dangerous and forbidden interest in the art of reasoning.
Pardon me, sir. I shall remove my brain before commenting again. Dangerous things these brains.
We are now way beyond stupid when it comes to the whole industry which has developed on the back of this scam. The award of research grants for what once was called science are now significantly skewed in favour of any half brained proposal for study which contains the term “climate change”. I have read several papers where the term totally irrelevant to the subject appears in the text almost as if it was inserted after the piece was written. A nod to the God of Climate Change is now virtue signalling on speed and an easy route to paying the bills.
Notice as in the case of the cuckoos, ALWAYS something is poorly understood but still presented as less than ideal (whatever ideal may be) and invariably is linked with a wave of the arm (without any solid empirical evidence whatsoever) to climate change. Never once do we see research grounded in reality. For example, what on earth did cuckoos do during the Roman Warm and the Medieval Warms you may ask? This simple question which divides the sane from a belief system never ever is pointed to which speaks volumes about what it is we really are dealing with.
Variation in the population of species is the norm not the exception. The shear fraud perpetrated for money around polar bears and the Barrier Reef are two cases in point. I always hear a Monty Python sketch in my head when recalling the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the extinction of Polar Bears and the death of the Great Barrier Reef…..but then they got better! Tellingly that paragon of impartiality, the BBC went to the extent of “hiding” the good news about the Barrier Reef in its Australia section avoiding putting it on their Science and Environment page. Good news clearly is not welcome.
This is telling. Even then the way the piece was written was so full of handwringing and “it may be only temporary ” and “we need more research” (aka more funding of course), you are left with with the feeling that there is a lot of vested interest in things being portrayed as bad.
Part of the problem I see is that there are no consequences for this illogical unscientific negativity. Certainly making fundamentally flawed and wrong predictions about climate has never hurt the careers of any of the Vroomfondel and Majikthise like “experts” that the BBC et al insist on wheeling out to pontificate. Climate Change has become a sentence filler and a catch all excuse for woes and yes, excuses for incompetence and increasingly a major source of cash. It is compelling that so many who attribute this or that to climate change seem not to have even a basic idea of exactly what climate actually is and how it changes and always has changed. I was late for work today…climate change. I am a complete loser…climate change. My atoll is sinking…climate change.. my delta I am sucking water out of is sinking… climate change. There was actually a case of a guy in court for a speeding offence who tried to invoke climate change in his defence. A wilful lack of understanding is no longer an impediment to the bringing out of the Climate Demon catch all excuse. This point has not been missed by several leaders of incompetently run countries around the world. A good example is the bloated top dog in Fiji. It is just a matter of scale of the fraud. The climate obsession has every hallmark of a religion. Facts are it’s enemy and any purveyor of facts which counter the narrative will be struck down. Throughout history individuals and peoples have blamed something or some one for their woes. Just like with climate change nothing good is ever attributed to the bogyman, only bad which if you think about it is fundamentally nonsensical. As the Earth warms it MUST make things better somewhere. The collective religious hysteria and desire to return to some none existent state of equilibrium in Western cultures is a product of only two things. First is though the power of the media and increasingly through indoctrination within our increasingly politicized education system. At a school level I call that child abuse.
That people can be led to yearn after the Little Ice Age and be so badly informed that they accept without question what is claimed which literally means one guy in the Midlands making iron from Black Band Iron Ore at the beginning of the 19th century caused a change in global temperatures. That there is no consideration that this data point was an anomalous low shows that even basic scientific setting of the scene went out of the window from the getgo. This is asininity on a galactical scale yet the “since the start of the industrial revolution” mantra is repeated again and again never of course together with evidence. The famously wrong interpretation of ice core curves for CO2 and temperature shown by the world famous physicist Al Gore is still repeated regardless of how wrong he was. Temperature rise is show to begin on average 800 years before CO2 increase begins but hey, let’s not let facts get in the way of Al Gore making a vast fortune. Most worrying of all is that now has been seen as something politically useful especially by the left and is being codified into law as we speak. We need look no further than the charade which is Net Zero to see just how useful Project Climate Fear has become. Woe betide anyone who calls out a marxist in socialists clothing for being a incompetent power hungry ideologue because Morlocks will appear from every direction accusing that person of being an enemy of the Planet and seeking to silence them by any means.
To close, we in the West used to think we were so clever when watching film clips of the absurd spectacle or regimented children chanting the party line in classrooms of the Soviet Union, China, Iran and N Korea. I have visions of children in America not reciting their allegiance to the flag at school each morning but standing like their marxist indoctrinated predecessors reciting the list of enemies and threats to the all powerful system which it is their duty to protect, with their lives if needs be.
How on earth is anyone able to work out that cuckoos across the world have reduced by 71 per cent? ” Cuckoos that do make the journey in time for European spring are found to have higher mortality rates,” researchers said, and how do they work that one out?