Country & Coast: Fascinating globetrotting of the Dales born cuckoo

The chances are, anyone who pulled into Killington services on the southbound M6 last week may even have heard Peckham uttering what for many is the quintessential sound of springtime as he began the process of re-establishing his breeding territory and finding a mate.

Over the weekend he moved on from there and the latest signals place him a short distance eastwards, near the town of Sedbergh, which is - remarkably - less than two miles from his birthplace.

The reason for keeping tabs on Peckham and the other cuckoos is simple. Cuckoos have declined by an alarming 65 per cent since the early 1980s. The cause is still far from clear but one theory that is currently under investigation is that droughts on their migration routes and habitat loss in their African wintering grounds have played a significant role.

So, fitting Peckham and the others with satellite tags may provide the answer, since some have literally disappeared from the radar. One of these was named Vigilamus by the folks at Fylingdales Early Warning Station on the North York Moors. Thankfully, though, Peckham has managed to keep on going.

His story began in the spring of 2015 at Jordan Wood on the slopes of Holme Knott in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, where his mother had laid the egg in the nest of another bird, probably a meadow pipit’s.

While still a fledgling he was satellite tagged by ornithologists and by late June 2015 he had flown south to Suffolk. At around about the same time, schoolchildren won a competition to provide him with a name, which is a quirky pun on David Beckham.

On July 1, Peckham left the UK, flew to Lorraine in northeastern France and a day later was in Switzerland.

He was next picked up four weeks later in northern Italy, and three days after that he had crossed the Sahara Desert to find a winter home near Okandja in Gabon, which is on the south side of the equator between Cameroon and the Republic of Congo. The journey was roughly 4,000 miles in length.

Incredibly, this is the place in Africa he returned to last winter, and from where he set off back to the Yorkshire Dales in March this year.

Signals on May 7 showed that he was crossing the Sahara. Two days later he was in Spain, then he headed north through Gloucestershire. By last week he was back on home turf.

Without his day-to-day movements being taken into account, Peckham’s migration flights have so far totalled 16,000 miles. If he manages the average cuckoo lifespan of five years his migrations will add up to 40,000 miles, which, incredibly, amounts to the distance of more than one and a half times the circumference of Earth.