Between 27 and 29 September, David moved 970km (603 miles) SSW from his location close to the border between Sudan and South Sudan. This placed him in some wet rainforest close to the Congo River in Tshopo District of DRC, a habitat occupied by poorly known animals such as the Okapi, a forest-dwelling relative of the giraffe, as well as the Bonobo, closest living relatives of humans, and a recently discovered species of monkey. He didn’t stay in this area long, though, and by this morning (2 October) he had moved a further 570km (354 miles) SW to a location quite close to the southern edge of the continuous rainforest in Mai-Ndombe District. He has progressed by 1570km (976 miles) in five days.
At about 3°S, David is now the most southerly of the tracked Cuckoos and is nearly as far south as the most southerly tracked Cuckoo reached last year (which was Kasper at about 4°S). If he continues along this path for about another 160km (100 miles), David will reach an area of savannah habitat with gallery forest similar to the Teke Plateau in which four of the Cuckoos tracked last winter spent the mid-winter period.
Having previously moved eastwards in southern Sudan, just north of South Sudan, we wondered whether David (and Roy) were heading to somewhere very different to last year’s Cuckoo. Like Roy, however, David has now headed off on a bearing west of south, back towards the wintering grounds of last year’s tracked birds. It’s not clear why Daivd moved so far eastwards first but it is notable that he moved across the northern edge of the Chaine des Mongos mountain range in northern CAR, whereas the routes of the other birds took them to its west, so he appears to have simply avoided the mountains via a different route.
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