Donal Hickey: We'll hear cuckoos any day now — or have you already?
Picture: Mcfadyen/ Alan Cuckoo Org Bto
Any day now, satellite-tracked cuckoos, which left here last summer for their wintering grounds in Africa, should be returning.
The project is being undertaken by our National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to learn of the migration patterns of this fascinating bird and where exactly it spends the winter months. Innate navigational abilities of migrating birds, about which we are discovering more all the time, are truly awesome.
Usually, the cuckoo gets here in late April, though there have been several reports of it coming earlier. People are already listening carefully for that unmistakeable call from this cheery harbinger of summer.
Much more research into cuckoo migration has been done in England, Scotland and Wales than here. From Britain, cuckoos take either a south-western flight path over Spain and Morocco, or a south-eastern route via Italy and the Mediterranean, before arriving in the Congo Basin, Central Africa.
Last May, the NPWS linked up with the BTO cuckoo team to satellite-track four Irish cuckoos: three from Killarney National Park, County Kerry, and one from Burren National Park, County Clare.
Indications, so far, are that our cuckoos follow similar routes to those from cross-channel. One, called Cuach Torc (after a mountain in Killarney), took a south-eastern course across France, Italy, and the Balkans.
By early August, it had crossed the Sahara desert and was in Sudan. By September 20, it had reached wintering grounds deep in a rainforest in a Congolese national park more than half the size of Wales.
Come early December, it was heading into the Democratic Republic of Congo. By March, it had left the Congo, flying 2,100km west to Ghana. At the time of writing, the last tracking date for Torc, March 24, showed it was still in west Africa and, by now, it should be well on its way back here.
Tradition is replete with beliefs about cuckoos and how they can bring you good, or bad, luck. In the schools’ folklore collection from the late 1930s, Mary MacCarthy, of Gortacloona national school, Bantry, County Cork, reported: “If while hearing the cuckoo for the first time, a person throws money from one hand to the other while the cuckoo is singing, he will have enough money during the year."
Finally, we’re entering the Scaraveen period — the last fortnight in April and the first fortnight in May — when the weather can be uncertain as summer knocks on the door. This is known in Irish as Garbh Shíon na gCuach (rough weather of the cuckoo). So, as the old saying goes, 'cast not a clout' for a while yet!