WILDLIFE CHAMPION - FRANK GARDNER

In our series about people with a passion for a species, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reveals his love of the common cuckoo.

- Jo Price

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?