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  Date / Time: 5/31/2009 4:00 AM UTC

  Where have all the cuckoos gone?
  

  Where have all the cuckoos gone?

  The decline of the cuckoo pits the environmental movement against the powerful farming lobby

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  • • Nicholas Milton
    • guardian.co.uk, Saturday 30 May 2009 11.00 BST

  

  The cuckoo is now on the RSPB's 'red list'. Photograph: Mark Hamblin/RSPB/PA

  The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men, for thus sings he: "Cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo!" O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear

  So opines Shakespeare in his beautiful poem about adultery, Spring. But sadly the bird that has lent its name to everything from Swiss clocks to the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is no longer on every tree. This spring you would be hard pressed to hear its distinctive call at all in many parts of the country.

  When I first worked for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds nearly 20 years ago monitoring farmland birds, the cuckoo was a common summer visitor to our countryside, arriving en masse every April. This year, despite going out bird watching nearly every weekend in my home county of Warwickshire, I have only just heard my first cuckoo and that was on a local nature reserve.

  According to the latest assessment from conservation groups, the number of cuckoos has declined by more than 60% since the 1960s, a decline matched by other once-common farmland birds including the lapwing and yellow wagtail. Together with 49 other birds they are now red-listed or classified as endangered. To put this into perspective, the decline of the cuckoo is the conservation equivalent of the loss of the HSBC bank from our high street or the loss of faith in our political system – it is a clarion call to fundamentally change the way we manage our countryside.

  If we can put billions of pounds into saving the banks and have a national debate on the future of politics, why can't we do the same for a bird which has featured in our literature and folklore for generations and probably more than any other defines the British countryside?

  Why the cuckoo has declined at such an alarming rate is still not fully understood but conservationists are rallying to its cause. The RSPB's Director of Conservation, Mark Avery, has called its disappearance "scandalous" and with the British Trust for Ornithology is carrying out urgent research. And the BBC flagship wildlife programme Springwatch, more used to highlighting the trials and tribulations of great tits and badgers, is asking its viewers to send in sightings.

  As a brood parasite, the cuckoo has a complex life cycle which includes migrating more than 4,000 miles each spring from sub-Saharan Africa. Problems in its wintering grounds and climate change may be causal factors but experts think the answer is more likely to be a lack of food, particularly its favourite – hairy caterpillars. Crucially, a lack of insects has also resulted in the decline of two of its host species, the meadow pipit and dunnock. The culprit? Modern agriculture.

  The plight of the cuckoo has therefore become highly political. After years of cooperation it threatens once again to pit the environmental movement against the powerful farming lobby. This time the battle is over the future of set-aside, the European Union agricultural scheme designed to take surplus land out of production which was abolished last year. The British government has just closed a consultation looking at two very different ways of trying to replace a scheme which by default has thrown a lifeline to many beleaguered farmland birds including the cuckoo. The option favoured by conservationists is for farmers to manage a small percentage of their land in return for subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy. Unsurprisingly, the option favoured by farmers is a voluntary approach, not linked to their subsidies.

  In Shakespeare's Henry IV as summer advances the cuckoo's note no longer attracts notice as it did in April, having grown familiar. Henry says to his wayward son: "Was but as the cuckoo is in June, heard not regarded".

  More than 400 years later I'd settle just to hear a cuckoo in June.

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