The Lincolnshire Bird Club

Having talked with Pete Short at Blacktoft Sands this morning about the distressing lack of cuckoos in this area despite the hundreds of reed warbler and other hosts' nests, I came back over the border and heard around midday a noise that we first thought was a distant dog but, when it turned out to be at the top of a tree, concluded that it was something else. I then managed to see the bird, not brilliantly but it clearly was a cuckoo. The song was a repeated (sometimes five or ten sequences but sometimes only two) double note, with the pitch and speed of a cuckoo but with the two notes separated by only a semitone or less. The song's quality was more or less that of Common Cuckoo.

As you know, Common Cuckoo song is a minor third. I've been to xeno-canto and cannot find any aberrant song like this one, and an online search for aberrant, atypical or unusual cuckoo song has produced nothing. I've also listened to Oriental Cuckoo songs: they seem mostly to have a much more hoopoe-like tone, and often have a fast sequence, but one or two recordings were a little bit like our bird (but not close enough to raise the pulse).

Does anyone know if aberrant songs of Common Cuckoo as I've described are recorded anywhere? Will the bird be there still tomorrow?

Andrew
Read this article. The writer has heard Cuckoo song in major thirds and fourths so there clearly is variety.
John

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/ ... the-cuckoo

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Contact: recorder_north@lincsbirdclub.co.uk

Thanks John. Were you really a subscriber to the Spectator in 1909? An interesting letter, though, and I especially liked: In our pedestrian way, we can but stump along from one determinate note to another, while the birds in their song, as in their flight, soar freely in "a diviner air." The last phrase turns out to be Wordsworth - “More pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams.” - which doesn't seem to describe modern-day Lincolnshire.

But yes, I take the point that cuckoos can vary the song's pitch and interval, and have now found another discussion of this subject at
http://entartetemusik.blogspot.co.uk/20 ... uckoo.html

However, I still haven't come across any mention of an interval as small as I heard. The bird involved may be at Alkborough now: we saw it flying west across the river at 8 p.m. yesterday.

Strange that you had cuckoo Andrew because this morning I went past the rape field that being part flailed (despite it being the breeding season) and I too had a strange bird - it turned out to be a fieldfare! Still no cuckoo on the reserve though - have you tried to find African or Oriental cuckoo call, just in case?!!

I wouldn't be surprised if it's flu!!