At 03.15 on the 31 May, Chris Hewson and a small band of helpers gathered in the gloom of a cold and misty morning at Natural England’s Cavenham Heath, Suffolk, with the aim of catching and fitting a satellite tag to one of the last cuckoos to join the class of 2013. The whole process was projected to take around two hours and the intrepid Cuckoo catchers would be back home in plenty of time for breakfast.
Five hours later in misty and windy conditions and with not a single one of the five or six cuckoos responding to their lures having been caught, catching operations were moved to a less misty patch of the heath and within twenty-minutes Nick the Cuckoo was caught – he wasn’t known as Nick at the time but this was chosen for him in honour of Professor Nick Davies (Department of Zoology, Cambridge University), an expert in the behavioural ecology of cuckoos.
After arriving on the heath at 03.15 the Cuckoo team left it at 09.15, happy in the knowledge that another Cuckoo would provide scientists at the BTO with more vital information.
On the 4 June, Nick left Cavenham Heath and moved to an area of farmland with patches of woodland just north of Newmarket and around 20km (13 miles) west of his previous location.
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