Our reduced interval Cuckoo is still with us at Garthorpe, heard singing close to the house most days, and occasionally from across the Trent. It's now expanded its range from a semitone to a whole tone or slightly more. No hint of a female yet, though.
Also cuckooish was a walk along the R Torne today (3.5km WBBS upstream from nr Sandtoft airfield). They were moving about a lot but I reckon we heard/saw five, including four singing males and one other, but again no female heard. Plenty of Reed Warblers here but one Cuckoo was being persistently chased by a Meadow Pipit.
One surprise was finding two broods of well-grown Lapwing chicks (three and two) at Samuel Closes Farm by the Torne in a heavily grazed horse pasture. Difficult to imaging they nested in it but they could have used ungrazed grassland nearby and then moved into the horse field.
A drake Shoveler in the Torne, also near Samuel Closes Farm, was the first in 14 years of surveying this route.
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