Updates from our Cuckoos

 Kasper is still in the southern savannah, north of Brazzaville. The last good transmission we had from him was on 27 December at 08.34, so we should hear from him again very soon.

 Martin too is still on the Teke Plateau, transmitting from just west of the village of Oko on 1 January at 18.28.

 We last heard from Lyster on 29 December, a transmission that showed he was still on the Teke Plateau.

 A transmission from Clement on 3 January at 07.53 showed that he is still on the Teke Plateau and still close to Lyster and Martin. Yesterday, the weather there was sticky and wet, with 80% cloud cover, 78% humidity and 11.2mm of rainfall.

Chris is still in the marshes just west of the border with Congo. We heard from him at 08.51 on 31 December. Of all five cuckoos, he is in the most unpopulated area.

Chris is the most northerly of the Cuckoos – in fact he is the only one still in the northern hemisphere, being three quarters of a degree above the equator. He took a similar route to Martin into Africa and was very close to him at their first location in Chad. However, we have been very surprised by where he has chosen to remain since 10 October - he is in some of the wettest forest in the Congo and from the satellite photos in Google Earth, the area appears to have continuous forest cover. He is the Western Congolian swamp forests ecoregion according to the WWF classification. This area is characterised by impenetrable swamps and forest that is flooded for several months of the year. Despite the inaccessibility of the area it is popular with cryptozoologists - people who search for animals whose existence is unproven – on account of the alleged sightings of a Loch Ness monster-like animal called the ‘Mokele-mbembe’ in the nearby Likouaka aux herbes swamp.

Kasper is the most southerly of the Cuckoos – he is currently in a patch of gallery forest 50km north of Brazzaville. This area is at the southern end of the Teke Plateau and is where the forest would naturally give way to savannah due to decreasing and more seasonal rainfall patterns. He has been there since 23 October and was the first Cuckoo to cross the equator.

Lyster is close to Clement and Martin (who came down from Central African Republic a week ago) on the Teke Plateau, using forest patches in this grassland/forest mosaic.  Despite being the last Cuckoo to leave Britain, Lyster was the second (after Kasper) to reach this far south, and has been there since 8 November. His closest neighbour is Clement – the other Cuckoo who left Europe via Iberia and entered the far western part of the African continent. They are approximately 90km apart – the distance that separates the locations at which they were tagged in East Anglia.