19.Young cuckoos are even cleverer than we thought…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the amazing journeys undertaken by adult Mongolian cuckoos - like Onon in this picture.

Here I talk very briefly about a fascinating new study, just published in the journal Nature. It reveals that young cuckoos - making their very first migratory journey all the way from Russia to Southern Africa - can somehow tell when they have been moved 1800 km to the east of their proper route. And, just like experienced adult birds, they can change course to compensate for this displacement.

It’s the first time such an ability has been clearly demonstrated in young birds and it leaves us wondering how they solve a problem that we humans only cracked a few hundred years ago.

18.My interview for the Stratford Literary Festival

I was lucky to be interviewed by the novelist Clare Clark who asked extremely good questions. I hope my answers measured up to them!

17.Amazing cuckoos

There’s no better way of getting a sense of what migratory birds can do than to look at the maps that record their journeys.

The Mongolian Cuckoo Project has been using tracking devices to follow the amazing journeys of cuckoos returning home from Southern Africa in recent weeks. Do please visit their excellent website to see the achievements of Onon, Bayan and the other birds. It’s a real model of public engagement in science.

Quite apart from the extraordinary distances the birds have been covering, I’m struck by the close similarity between the routes they have been following. It would be fascinating to know exactly how they perform such impressive navigational feats.

Presumably, like many other migratory birds, cuckoos have a sun and star compass as well as a magnetic one. And when they have made their first migratory journey, it’s safe to assume that they use familiar landmarks to help them retrace their route. But of course there are no landmarks over the ocean!

And cuckoos face a special problem. Their unusual lifestyle means that when they first head south, they must do so alone - because their parents will have left before them.

So how on earth do they find their lonely way over thousands of miles of land and ocean to the areas in Africa where they pass the winter months? Some kind of genetic program must be involved. But how does that work? We just don’t know.

One last thing: why not lend your support to this brilliant project by following this link?

5.The night and stars: Henry Beston on Cape Cod in the 1920s

‘With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night?  Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?…Be the answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.’

from ‘The Outermost House’, Chapter 8: ‘Night on the Great Beach’