Updates from our Cuckoos

We haven't heard from Victor for a couple of weeks but looking at the last batch of data we received the battery level was low on his tag. He is in an area of dense forest and the solar panel on the tag is probably not seeing much sunlight. Fingers crossed it gets enough to send us more data soon.

Victor seems settled in the rainforest in central eastern Gabon. He has moved 19km (12 miles) south within the forest and is now quite close to Robinson, one of our other tagged Cuckoos. It might be that this is his winter site, although in the 2016 he wintered in Angola and in 2017, Gabon. He is currently midway between these two areas.

Since arriving in Gabon on 19 October Victor seems pretty settled. He is still in an area of dense forest close to his arrival point.

During the last couple of weeks, Victor has moved south out of Cameroon and into Gabon. He is currently to the northwest of the Teke plateau and close to three of our other tagged Cuckoos, Bowie, Knepp and Robinson, in an area of very dense forest.

During the last couple of weeks Victor has been making his way east towards the Congo. He is currently in southern Cameroon and around 500km (342 miles) from the northern edge of the Teke plateau.

Victor is still at his stopover site in Burkina Faso. In 2016 he moved east from here on 31 August and in 2017 on 14 August, he could make his move east any day now. His next staging location is close to the Kainji Reservoir in western Nigeria, another 900km (580 miles) to the east of his current location.

It seems Victor might have had an interesting flight over the desert. He started his crossing in a southeasterly direction but about a third of the way into the desert he began heading west and continued on this track all the way to Burkina Faso and the southern edge of the desert. Burkina Faso has been his staging area for the last two years, in 2017 he arrived here on 19 Jul and on 1 August in 2016.

It is interesting to look at the winds during his crossing. For the first part, when he was heading east, he was flying into a light headwind coming from the southeast, roughly at the point he started heading west he met a light headwind coming from the southwest. We know that birds prefer to fly into light headwinds, doing so gives them a greater degree of control over their flight than a tailwind would, but it is great to see this in action. Of course if the headwind is too strong birds will sit it out until conditions improve.

Over the weekend, Victor's tag showed that he was in Algeria and on the northern edge of the Sahara, but around breakfast on 9 July, three poor locations from his tag suggest he has already begun his desert crossing and that he was to the south of the Grand Erg Oriental Desert. This puts him around a third of the way into his desert flight. 

A series of locations received around breakfast on 5 July show that Victor is in Spain, the map will show this when it automatically updates. He has flown 620km (385 miles) in just over two days. He is currently south of Fayon and the Ebro River.

Victor is in France, having arrived late evening on 17 June. He is using the same area of woodland close to Chateauroux, that Lambert used on his way south.