Anecdote of the journalist: a friend tells me that every month of April and May I heard for the first time the cuckoo in a certain place of the Guipuzkoan Goierri… but that in this 2022 it does not have rastro.Afortunadamente, it still appears more in the Goierri but… has something denounced us that has failed us the annual quote? Where, how, why has it been lost?

It seems that he has been more lucky than the cuckoo lost by Goierri who have baptized PJ in the English region of Suffolk: PJ has returned for the seventh consecutive year from the African tropics to England, as opened by the British Trust for Ornitology (BTO) in early May. In 2016, he was caught and put on a small satellite control device.

Since then they have been almost permanently located, and that is why they know that PJ, which has returned for the seventh time to lay its eggs in England, has flown for those years 96,000 kilometres, from Suffolk to the Congo. Like the displacements of the European quota, Asians are investigating, who also invests in tropical Africa to undertake an almost endless spring odour trip to Mongolia, China or Siberia.

The BTO, aware that the cucos have decreased almost 40% in England in the last three decades, began in 2011 an extensive research to learn more about the life of this bird. He began to capture the cucos, mark them and provide them with satellite observation devices, trying to know the details of his annual life and, above all, his annual migration to Congo. An amazing BTO video shows how they catch the cuckoo on the net, just as pigeons in the Pyrenees perceive, attracted by the recordings of their brushes. This observation allows them, for example, to realize that some migration routes are more deadly than others.

This year PJ departed from the Congo Valley, on the border between Congo and Christmas, at the end of February, from where it headed to Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire in the first leap. Here he pasted a few weeks and on April 4 he began to cross the Sahara non-stop. In a few days he arrived on the Iberian Peninsula and on 24 April to his native town and second residence of Suffolk. The BTO scientists trust the journalists who had their heart in the hole in their mouth as they felt their cuckoo on an amazing journey, fearing that any unforeseen would be lost forever along the way.

Right now, they're tracking from the BTO to twelve squats. Seven of them continue to receive signals, have four lost in hopes of finding them again and believe it can be a month. As in Euskal Herria, the adult cucos make a stay of 8-12 weeks, in England they usually stay between 6 and 8 weeks, being forced to arrive later and participate earlier towards the sites of Congo and Angola. In fact, researchers believe that different migratory routes affect their mortality.

The European squares, from those arriving to Scotland, to those ending up in Belarus, cross the Mediterranean at the end of summer through the west – through the Pyrenees through Spain and Portugal – and the others through the Balkan Mountains and Italy. Before entering the Sahara desert, they strive and concentrate forces. The study shows that our areas are more dangerous for the quota than the Italians, who suffer a much higher mortality rate on the Iberia route. It is very remarkable, because as for the duration of the journey, the Atlantic is much shorter than the Balkans and Italy.

By the end of the winter, however, it seems that the journey from Congo to Europe is carried out mainly by the Atlantic, the most dangerous route. Many of our cubes are lost there, because the places where they rested in Morocco or in Spain are now covered by concretes or because industrial agriculture has eliminated the caterpillars that are the cuckoo food with pesticidas.Las caterpillars love to eat the cucos, which
are the second face of the nocturnal butterflies, the same butterfly and the same caterpillar in both phases of life. The loss of these butterflies is one of the main causes of bird decline.

The disappearance of caterpillars has been caused by insecticides widely used in agriculture, amateur orchards and also in forestry. The decrease in butterflies and fears is also related to the loss of biodiversity in the vegetation, both by the destruction of flowers and plants fed and by the destruction of shelters.

But, on the other hand, the cuckoo's way of life is characterized by being a clear indicator of the state of biodiversity: a parasite. As it is famous, the female kuku lays its eggs not in a nest made by it, but in more than one nest made by other birds. The first job that every Kuku child will do at birth is to expel all other adjacent eggs and pups from the nest; their parents will be forced to replace their pups with a strange puppy, a puppy that will immediately be much older than them.

The list of birds doomed to grow unconsciously a cuckoo puppy is very long, and they're all much smaller than cuckoo, like the petirrojo, the carricero, the Chinese, the caulk, the txio, the launcher, the rope -- all these fine birds have fallen dramatically in the last decades. To name just one, many citizens who are over 60 years old today have known some of these birds singing in the cage, trapped on the mountain with bezel or other arts. Today, citing a young man the Txoka (Linaria Cannabina) and his beautiful song is to perform an archaeological exercise. With the reduction of the small birds, the nests for the couples of cucos and the fathers of pseudo-mothers for the offspring have been reduced.

The smallest bird, besides pesticides and the artificialization of the territory, is related to the loss of biodiversity of the vegetation. The scrambled forests have been replaced by tree monocultures, in which the pine tree is long, increasingly eucalyptus. The same has been the loss of hedges throughout Europe, living fences with trees, shrubs, scrubs and plants of all kinds. Their diversity conditioned and affected most bugs, birds and other living things, and thousands of miles of hedges have been destroyed since the 1960s.

Biologist Chloe Denerley, a professor at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), has advanced in a study published in 2018 some changes that, as in Britain, should take place across Europe to recover the cuckoo: “In all areas, it must be encouraged that the grasslands are full of diverse vegetation, that the use of pesticides in crops is reduced, that the hedges and margins are cut once or less a year, and that the outbreaks that underlie them, that chemical fertilizers are not used outside the field…”

A rigorous programme is therefore proposed, both to the agricultural and land management planners and to the citizens, who have become slaves to the aesthetic culture of villas of the villa type. The program consists of restarting the biodiversity of all our corners until the 1960s levels, when plants, flowers, bugs, caterpillars and fine birds grow as much as in 1960.