Cuckoos clock up the miles on migration - British Trust for Ornithology
Satellite technology is helping scientists from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to better understand the pressures that the UK’s breeding Cuckoos face as they make annual migrations of 16,000 km to central Africa and back.
Cuckoos are a widespread and familiar bird across much of the UK, and many people can recognise the famously onomatopoeic song, but sadly we have lost more than a third of our breeding Cuckoos since 1995.
Researchers from BTO have been delving into every aspect of these characterful birds’ lives, trying to better understand the causes behind these continuing, and concerning declines.
Since 2011, more than 130 Cuckoos from around the UK and Ireland have been fitted with state-of-the-art tags which can be located by satellites passing overhead. Based on the frequency of the signals that the tags transmit, scientists can follow the birds’ routes in real time, allowing them to potentially identify significant obstacles and challenges that these remarkable travellers face as they make their epic cross-continental journeys. This spring an additional six birds have been fitted with these tags.
And this year, for the first time, BTO have also deployed a series of highly accurate GPS tags to an additional sample of five Cuckoos that will allow the experts to see the birds’ routes and habitat use in even finer detail. These innovative tags, which record locations and can be downloaded via the mobile phone network, have been provided as part of the ‘Migratelane’ project, funded by Office Français de la Biodiversité and run by the Paris Natural History Museum, which aims to assess the potential impacts on migrating birds of proposed wind farms in the English Channel and Bay of Biscay. These new tags will also allow BTO scientists to look at the local movements and habitat use of Cuckoos in the UK during the breeding season, and just prior to migrating.
Posted On: 16/06/2025
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