Animal Migration: Part Two

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The number of cuckoos has dropped dramatically

Animal Migration in a climate of Change, a series of programmes highlighting the issue of animal migration and the changing world around them.

Part Two, Silent Landscapes, focuses on how environmental change is affecting some popular bird species.

Few birds in Northern Europe are as familiar as the cuckoo.

Each year it arrives in large numbers from its wintering grounds south of the African Sahara to call in forests and farmland from Britain east to Russia and beyond.

But over the last forty years or so, cuckoos in the United Kingdom have declined by nearly two thirds.

They're not alone; a large number of migrant songbirds including pied flycatchers, willow warblers, turtle doves and yellow wagtails are undergoing steep and alarming declines in range and numbers.

Talking to experts on bird monitoring and migration, Brett Westwood explores why these birds are suffering so badly.

For each species the story is slightly different. The Pied Flycatcher, for instance is being hit twice, on passage in the dwindling cork oak groves of Portugal and Spain which it depends on for food and shelter for its journey south, and on its breeding grounds in the woods of western Europe, where, thanks to climate change, the caterpillars it needs to feed its young have already hatched and disappeared.

Other birds, like the Turtle Dove, are hit by changing farming practices.

In his search to find the true origins of the North European migrants, Brett visits the Gambia in West Africa, where European Willow warblers and Nightingales sing alongside hornbills and sunbirds.