Cuckoos in Wales bucking the trend and thriving

Cuckoo numbers have increased in Wales, bucking the national trend. Photo credit Derek Belsey/BTO.

July 2009. The Cuckoo has been much in the news lately because of its steep declines in large parts of the UK and its subsequent addition to the red list of Birds of Conservation Concern. However, the latest results from the BTO/RSPB/JNCC Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) show that this enigmatic bird increased by 35% in Wales between 2007 and 2008, bucking the trend shown in the rest of the UK.

Kate Risely BTO Breeding Bird Survey Organiser, said, "It is great to see that many of the birds in Wales are doing well. Each year, there are many birdwatchers in Wales that go out with notebooks to count birds for the Breeding Bird Survey. It is thanks to their efforts that we are able to report on changes in the population of birds like the Cuckoo and the populations of birds in Wales generally."

Cold winters
Mark Eaton Senior Conservation Scientist, Species Monitoring & Research at the RSPB commented, "It is good to see a number of birds increasing in Wales and it will be interesting to see how they have coped with the recent cold winter. With climate change there will be greater extremes in the weather and some birds will cope with this better than others, so monitoring these changes is extremely important."

Pierre Tellier, JNCC commented, 'The increase in volunteer effort over the last few years has meant that we are able to get Welsh trend data on more species. We hope to be able to build on this enthusiasm in future years, to enable us to gain similar information on some of our scarcer species, for which we still need more survey coverage."

Selected highlights from the BBS report.
• Cuckoo increased by 35% in Wales between 2007 and 2008, unlike in the UK as a whole, where this species showed a 5% decline over the same period, and a 37% decline since the start of BBS.
• Skylarks had seemed to be doing better in Wales than in the UK as a whole, but declined by 19% in Wales between 2007 and 2008, dropping to their lowest level since the start of the survey in 1994.
• Linnets also fell by 10% between 2007 and 2008, to their lowest level since the start of the survey.