Updates from our Cuckoos

Vigilamus has been named by staff at RAF Fylingdales. Vigilamus is the station motto meaning "We are watching"  which is apt as RAF Fylingdales monitors the satellites that will be tracking our Cuckoos!

It looks likely that BB, Peter, Skinner, Waller and Whortle have failed to complete their migration this year, or their tags are no longer transmitting, and so we will be moving all of them to the inactive section of the website.

Over the last week we've only received poor quality locations from Fred but there are enough of them in the same location to indicate that he left the UK and has been in northern France since the 10 June. His location will only update on the map once a good quality location has been received.  He is close to the western coast, near to La Roche-sur-Yon, while Ash, who transmitted from France on 16 June, is further north and east.  

The British summer is over for Ash as he has now left the country and made his way to northen France, beginning his migration south to Africa.  He's not the only one to have left as we believe Fred is also in France and has been for a few days.

Freds last location was in Morocco in early May but since then he has travelled across mainland Europe and yesterday arrived back in the UK, at his breeding site in Sherwood Forest. He is the tenth tagged Cuckoo to return this spring.   

By the 11 May Chester had covered the 1500km (930 miles) from his last location in Spain and returned to his breeding grounds at Ashdown Forest in Sussex, becoming the ninth of our tagged Cuckoos to make it back to the UK.

Jake has made it back to England after successfully completeing his Sahara crossing. Ths last good signal we had from Jake's tag was in Benin so we were pleased to see him safely return. 

No further signals have been received from Emsworthy's tag since 19 March. He was still alive when we last heard from his tag - but the charge was very low. We may well here from it again after he's crossed the Sahara but it's possible the battery will have degraded too much for that to happen. 

Fred is back on the map after a period of silence and has finally moved north from Ivory Coast and made his crossing of the Sahara desert. By the 2 May he had made suvvesfully completed it and made it to Morocco, to a location close to Marrakesh.  

Chester has continued on from north Africa and by 1 May was in southern Spain, just north of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.