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WILDLIFE CHAMPION - FRANK GARDNER
BBC Wildlife
|January 2021
In our series about people with a passion for a species, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reveals his love of the common cuckoo.
Why are you championing the common cuckoo?
This is not just an iconic species of the British spring. It has a particular resonance for those of us old enough to remember hearing their distinctive call each spring, without fail. Sadly, those calls have become so much rarer in England now. I last heard a cuckoo in a field on Thursley Common in Surrey on an unseasonably cold day in April last year – so cold the cuckoo may have been having second thoughts. The same male returns with such regularity to the same spot that he has even been given a nickname: ‘Colin’. He comes down from the trees to feast on mealy grubs, accompanied by redstarts, woodlarks and whinchats.
Why have we lost so many cuckoos in the UK?
This story is from the January 2021 edition of BBC Wildlife.
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