I HAD planned a more sharply political topic for these notes, but spring has arrived full-on. It demands attention. If you’ve any free time, then let it demand yours.

The oaks are in golden-green leaf. The bluebells are a hyacinth-scented carpet of blue-purple. Small lanes and woodland rides are a garden of colour. Cuckoo flower, stitchwort, wood spurge, bugle, fading primroses.

Only one thing spoils it. It’s full of odd silences. Odd absences of hoped-for sound.

Out at the weekend, we stopped to picnic by a big overgrown pond of sedge, sallow, alder and dead ash. It’s always been good for birds. We munched in silence. No cuckoo. No nightingale. No sedge warbler. Not even blackcap or whitethroat. Blue sky and lush green… and silence.

To be sure it was afternoon siesta time for the birds, but you’d not expect a swath of true silence. There’s always some songbird that wants to sing. Later the commoner birds came back to life, but only the blackcap from those I’ve listed.

Till a few days ago I’d not heard a first nightingale or even a cuckoo. It seems we’re in the end game for that herald of spring. Here’s a poem I wrote 12 years ago.
 
NO CUCKOOS NO CUCKOOS

“Shhhhh... Can you hear that?…
“Listen … ”
Under Leith Hill  …
From Fulking Down  …
In Warningore’s deep wooded green  …
Faint  …
Off  …
But quite distinct  …
The sound of spring.
 

No more.
The woods are empty now
Of call and counter call
Across the hursts and combes,
The lanes and leys and brooks and bournes.
 
Springtime and bluebells —
But now gone
That simple two-note invitation to
Green mysteries of underwood and shaw,
Lush hedgerow, stream and meadow.
 
The chime that nature’s clock
Has rung each spring
Since time long aeons past
Before our coming
Has stopped. Has stopped.
 
Like winter without Christmas,
Like soaps without signature tunes,
Like children without birthdays  …
 
It marks an end that sinks my heart so low
That bluebell-heavy scent
And all the song of evening thrush
And tender freshness of new bursting leaf
Can’t shift this heaviness.
 
But then I got up proper early and was out by the stream and the brooks at 4.14am. In the darkness I first heard silence… then picked up the distant jazzy sounds of nightingales.

Walking along the streamside there was a real crowd of ’em at full blast in the thorn thickets… Buzzing, zitting, making melody… fluting wet-throated lyrics, slip-slap trills and arabesque warblings, rattling… reflective… bold… teasing, wheezing out long tip-toe riffs… then staccato calls that cannot be ignored…
 
The music of night silence, dawn’s loud chorus, evening peace.
 
I walked on. Then, as the first tints of brook pasture green displaced pure darkness, and duck-egg blue and watery orange glowed in the eastern sky, I heard that first cuckoo… distant… and rather frantic.
 
He was still non-stop cuckooing 40 minutes later … not joined by any rival or potential mate. Why was he on his own, when he should be jostling his rivals for the attention of the lasses?

It’s only two or three years since I watched several male cuckoos squabbling over a female in the trees at that spot. That should be a common sight. Groups of males cuckooing through the trees after the females. Squabbling right above your head. Pure testosterone. “Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuck… cuck… cuc—” Crash! as they clash in the branches.

You’d see the opposite too. Sitting on a slope above the river we watched below two female cuckoos tracking down two males, who were calling out on the reedy brooks. (The females do their chasing silently).

Does every spring welcome nowadays have to be tinged with worries about extinction and loss? I’m afraid so. Though if you come from Scotland or Wales you’ll be hearing the cuckoos much more than us southerners.

Your Scottish cuckoos have been saved from recent decline by taking a migration route through Italy which can still provide them with ample fattening food for their trans-Saharan flight.

Our southern cuckoos, by contrast, take a route through Spain, where climate change-induced drought has badly damaged their ability to feed enough to build the fatty reserves that can see them through their Saharan crossing. That’s one of the reasons for their steep decline.

They used to be birds of garden and farmyard, as much as wild places. So did nightingales (but nightingales have always been a south-eastern bird).

As a boy I found a wren’s nest on the scruffy edge of our suburb that I returned to often, soon realising that a cuckoo baby had taken over. Gradually the cuckoo grew, until, when fledged, it wore the little wren’s nest like a coat, with its big head poking out. (Wren’s nests are a globe of moss, leaf and grass with a small entrance hole). The cuckoo must eventually have busted free like Superman bursting out of his business suit.

Back in 2007, we noted 23 cuckoos in our countryside. Last year I heard just five, plus one in a different countryside.

If you live in the lowlands and want to hear cuckoos you’ll probably do best to go to a river floodplain with reedy ditches or relict fen. Cuckoos divide up into genetic clades based upon particular host species, such as reed warbler, meadow pipit or dunnock (though many other small birds may be used) and in lowland England reed beds are still fairly easy to find. If they are any size there will be reed warblers there, as cuckoos know.

If you live near moorland or fell that’s where you’ll most likely find cuckoos, because that’s where the meadow pipits are.

A close encounter

There’s one delight I’ve had this spring that especially stands out.

After I’d walked through bluebells down a Wealden gill slope to stand on the stream bank, a kingfisher shot out from close to me, piping away. I called grandson Che over. The banks of the stream were vertical, often with overhangs and fallen timber. Perfect for kingfisher nest holes.

Che walked along one bank, scanning the opposite bank for likely holes. I did the same along the other bank. After only a few paces he spotted a hole below me. It was a kingfisher hole, but obviously old, and stuffed full of acorns. (Put there by an acrobatic jay?)

Che pointed to a second hole a few paces further on. It looked fresh and occupied. We walked off upstream.

Dipping my net in the stream further up from the nest I found bullhead (miller’s thumb) fishlings … so the pair shouldn’t go short. There are big fishing ponds in easy flying distance too.

We’ve been back once, watching from a distance, from the cover of trees, and seen the kingfishers twice, flying back and forth to the hole.

We’ll keep a discreet eye for the rest of their time there. Magic.