On Saturday evening (6 August) Martin was still on the edge of the Chari River floodplain. The Chari River provides most of the water flowing into Lake Chad and much of Chad’s population is concentrated around it. The weather today is a balmy 26°C with scattered cloud, however, thunderstorms are expected.
Updates from our Cuckoos
Read the latest updates from our Cuckoos on their epic migration between the UK and tropical Africa, or track their movements in real-time on our Cuckoo migration map.
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Storms expected
09 Aug 2011
Clement still in the Foret de Diambour
09 Aug 2011
Yesterday evening (8 August) Clement was still in the Foret de Diambour, Senegal. Today’s weather should suit him, it is 25° C, dry and overcast.
Chris moves another 61 miles
05 Aug 2011
At around 2000hrs on Wednesday (3 August) evening Chris was still at the location he had been in since his arrival in Chad nine days previously. Four hours later, however, he had moved 100km (61 miles) SSE (from 10’ 392 N to 9’ 48” S) and he remained at this location for the last four hours of his tags transmission cycle. He is now only 100km from the border with Central African Republic and as expected has headed towards the areas with higher rainfall and denser vegetation.
Lyster lingers and recovers from crossing
05 Aug 2011
Lyster’s tag is not charging well so we received only a few low-accuracy locations when his tag came on early on Thursday morning (4 August). These were, however, enough to tell us that he had not moved from his Spanish staging post. This means he has spent a week there so far so was clearly in need of significant refuelling before attempting the Saharan crossing.
Judging from the other birds, we expect him to move rapidly south with no further stop-overs once he leaves this spot but we don’t know when that will be. The other Cuckoos spent 2-4 weeks at their final stopovers but given his late departure from the breeding area, we might expect Lyster to spend less than or towards the bottom of this range. His tag is next due to come on around the middle of the day on Saturday.
Kasper searching for a spot
01 Aug 2011
Kasper has moved back! Having moved 200km south of his previous position in southern Chad and then approached Kano city, Kasper returned north and is now 110km (67 miles) SE from his original position! From google earth, this area looks to be better served with water features and patches of woodland than the more southerly area he visited so it appears he is wandering in search of favourable conditions rather than undertaking ‘true’ migratory movements at the moment.
Chris stays in Chad
01 Aug 2011
On Saturday (30 July) Chris was still in the same part of southern Chad, between the villages of Sobo and Daguéla, west of Zakouma NP.
Lyster refuels
01 Aug 2011
On Saturday (30 July) Lyster was still in the Parque Naturel del Alto Tajo area. He is clearly carrying out some re-fuelling in this landscape of pine forest-clad mountains in preparation for the Saharan crossing – how long until he makes a break to the south...? We are expecting transmissions to resume this afternoon (Monday 1 August).
1700hrs update: Positions just received show that Lyster is still in the same area. His tag will keep transmitting until the early hours of tomorrow morning so we would know very soon if he left the stop-over tonight.
Martin on floodplain
01 Aug 2011
Martin is still just south of the Chari River in SW Chad. He appears to be on the edge of the heavily-cultivated floodplain, adjacent to the more wooded landscape to the south.
Clement feeding up
01 Aug 2011
Clement remains in the Forest Diambour and is presumably finding good feeding conditions here.
Kasper has moved on
29 Jul 2011
Yesterday evening (Thursday 28 July) we picked him up 200km (122 miles) south of his previous location, apparently stationary just west of the Challawa Gorge Dam in northern Nigeria. When we last picked him up, in the early hours of this morning he was 35km (21 miles) ENE of here, 30km (18 miles) SW of the city of Kano. We don’t know whether he continued his slow nocturnal movement from here or whether he has settled in this area – we should find out when his tag resumes transmissions on Sunday morning.
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