Updates from our Cuckoos

Continuing his move south-eastwards, Martin did not hang around the location he had reached on the 25th. We next picked him up in the Central African Republic on the 27th August after having travelled another 250km. He has apparently homed in on another river system (if you zoom into the map you can see the dark line of trees surrounding the watercourse.

Clement is continuing on his flight eastwards. It looks as though he left his last position near Kaduna on the evening of 28th August and headed eastwards for another 275km just to the NW of the Yankari Game Reserve. He is again in an area of farmland with scattered bushes. Interestingly his flight has taken him within 60km of the A P Leventis Ornithological Institute based in Jos.

Chris remains in southern Chad and seems settled in his current location.

No change in Kasper's position. He remains near the forest reserve and makes trips around the surrounding farmland.

Martin remained on the edge of the Chari River floodplain until late on 24 August. A series of locations extending into 25 August showed him leaving the area to the southeast. By 0550hrs he had settled in an area 160km SE of his previous residency.

Kasper has remained in the area around the Bayan Dutsin Forest Reserve in northern Nigeria since the last update. He has clearly found good foraging conditions – we are interested to see how long he will remain there.

We were a little worried as Lysters tag failed to transmit on the 22nd August but today it burst into life. His new location showed that he had crossed the desert and was in northern Senegal. Now that he has become the fifth of our tracked Cuckoos to successfully cross the Sahara, we will be following his next moves closely, in particular to see whether he follows Clement back east towards the other Cuckoos or spends a longer period in West Africa.

One week after apparently settling in Burkina Faso, Clement had been on the move again and popped up in Togo! On Friday 19 August we received a series of positions for him just inside the extreme north of Togo, close to the border with Benin. By yesterday evening (Sunday 21 August), however, he had continued his journey to the east and was in western Nigeria, having travelled 500km (312 miles) ESE since Friday and 1025km (640 miles) almost due east since Wednesday.

Clement is now our most southerly Cuckoo, having reached 9.5 degrees N. His rapid easterly movement over the past two weeks mean that the four Cuckoos that have crossed the Sahara are now separated by about 1,500km, compared to the 3,500km soon after they had crossed the desert. It is fascinating that they have taken quite different routes to end up in very similar positions!