Sound of the cuckoo still strong in our forests

Driving through a huge area of clear-felled woodland in the North York Moors National Park, out of the corner of one eye Mick Carroll can spot a small brown bird like a tree pipit more than a hundred yards away.

Above the throaty growl of his four-wheel-drive vehicle he can hear the purring of turtle doves, and when a flock of small birds flits high across the track ahead he instantly identifies them as a party of crossbills.

Mick himself is a regular sighting on the remote logging roads of the neighbouring Dalby, Cropton and Langdale Forests, which together extend for over 22,000 acres.

He is the founder and secretary of the North Yorkshire Forest Bird Study Group and in this capacity Mick helps to keep a constantly updated count of more than 50 different species of birds.

The group was set up after local birdwatchers took part in a national survey of nightjars run by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) in 1992.

Having found a group of people who were prepared to go out and do regular counts, it was decided to try and keep them together with the specific intention of doing further study and data gathering on the wider birdlife of the huge forests of the North York Moors National Park.

It has almost 50 members and the group’s efforts have resulted in these forests becoming one of the most surveyed areas of England.

The group’s sightings of birds in spring and summer are fed directly to the BTO’s Breeding Bird Survey.

Volunteers visit a one-kilometre square twice during the nesting season and record all the birds they see or hear.

This has helped the BTO to monitor population changes of over 100 species in the UK.

In the North Yorkshire forests there are 24 such squares being covered.

Mick describes the Breeding Bird Survey as “brilliant.” It’s way of making sure a lot of people go out and bring back valuable information, he says.

“In a place like these big forests, where there’s lots of cover for birds, there’s no substitute for getting stuck right in and finding out what species are there.”

The survey, run by one of the group’s members, Tony Lewis, is now in its 14th year, although one year was missed in 2001 because of foot-and-mouth disease.

Over that period nine species have shown a significant increase: woodpigeon, turtle dove, robin, blackbird, song thrush, garden warbler, blackcap, chiffchaff and carrion crow. Only one species, the wren, has shown a significant decrease.

Of the 51 species recorded, several are considered very rare, including the goshawk and honey buzzard.

Mick wears several hats. Besides that of Forest Bird Study Group secretary he is also president of Scarborough Field Naturalists Society, regional representative of the BTO and a volunteer member of Natural England’s Hen Harrier Team, which is trying to protect one of the UK’s most endangered birds of prey on Yorkshire’s moorland.

Mick believes the forest birds are thriving because of sympathetic management of the woodland by the Forestry Commission, which employs a full-time Wildlife Ranger, Mick Douch, who is also member of the group.

The three most sought- after birds by birdwatchers in the forests are nightjar, turtle cove and cuckoo, all of which are doing well compared to other parts of Yorkshire and the UK.

The Nightjar is the runaway success story in North Yorkshire’s forests.

This elusive bird has declined or completely disappeared in many other parts of Yorkshire.

Nocturnal in habits and famous for its spooky churring call and aerobatics in which it claps its wings together like a hand-clap, the nightjar has made the huge forests of Dalby, Cropton and Langdale their key stronghold in Northern Britain.

“Nightjars are doing fantastic at the moment,” says Mick.

“A few years back they had a real dip. It might have been some factor in their wintering grounds, places like Zambia below the Sahara region.

“But they’ve really recovered and we had an estimate of 500 last year.”

The figure is thought to be the same for 2011, and it is expected that the population will increase in future years because the clear-felled areas – where timber has recently been cut – is quickly covered over by heather and scrub, the kind of habitat loved by nightjars.

“We’re bidding to find out more about nightjars by ringing some of the birds each year,” Mike says.

“Long-term that may help answer whether the same individual occupies the same territory after returning from winter migration.”

The turtle dove, of course, has strong Yuletide associations because of The Twelve Days of Christmas traditional song.

But the turtle dove is actually a summer visitor to Britain.

Once considered primarily a farmland species, its Yorkshire strongholds used to extend through the Vales of Pickering and York to the flat fields of South Yorkshire.

But in the last 30 years it has declined in these areas. At the same time, the great forestry plantations of the North York Moors have seen a remarkable increase in turtle doves.

It is far from being a common bird, however.

It is now on the UK’s Red List, denoting the highest concern for its future because its breeding population has gone done by more than half over the last 25 years.

Since the Forest Bird Study Group began surveys in 1997, when just three were counted, the number has risen to 20.

The general increase over the years is over 250 per cent while in the rest of the UK there has been a 70 per cent population decrease.

The cuckoo, the great harbinger of the English spring, has suffered a drop in numbers of almost two-thirds in the past 25 years.

In and around these forests it is doing well however.

Mick says: “I recently read a book called Say Goodbye To the Cuckoo which claims they’re all disappearing.

“It made me feel quite depressed.

“And then I go out around our forests and every half mile I get a cuckoo, so I wonder what’s going on?

“I can’t speak for the rest of England but all I know is there’s plenty of them calling here, as anyone who visits the area will tell you.”

Numbers fluctuate from year to year and there was a dip in the count totals after 2005 but last year 12 birds were counted, all of them in Langdale.

One reason they are thought to be doing well is that their so-called host species – birds like tree pipits and meadow pipits, in whose nests they lay their eggs – are thriving too.

Why the cuckoo is being silenced

Nationally Cuckoo numbers have dropped by 65 percent since the early 1980s. They mainly invade the nests of dunnock, meadow pipit, pied wagtail and reed warbler and it may be that changes in the numbers of these species, or when they breed, has re-set the cuckoo’s clock to its disadvantage. Or in my be down its food source – mainly caterpillers – being in shorter supply or some adverse change in the conditions along the cuckoo’s migration routes or on its over-wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa. Scientists have fitted five cuckoos with tiny satellite tags to try and shed light on the decline.