The sound of silence: The Cuckoo is vanishing

In two or three weeks' time, you should be hearing it if you get out into the countryside – the unmistakable two-note call, perhaps the most distinctive sound in all of the natural world, that tells you spring is well and truly under way. Even people who have never heard the real thing know the call of the cuckoo.

It's partly its sheer musicality, for those two abrupt, liquid notes – cuck-coo! – form an exact musical interval in a way hardly any other bird calls do: it is a descending minor third. At its simplest, in the key of C major, it is G to E. (And C major, you may be interested to learn, is a favourite cuckoo key.)

Listen to the cuckoo

Related articles

• More Environment News
• Search the news archive for more stories

It's partly also its ethereal, disembodied nature. The cuckoo is a shy, secretive bird. You don't often glimpse it, you simply hear it, so you can't see where the call is coming from; but it also has a sort of ventriloquial quality, so you can't hear where it's coming from, either. It doesn't seem to come from anywhere. It exists, disembodied, in the landscape, in a quite magical way, captured by Wordsworth, who called it "the wandering voice".

Put them together – perfect musicality and a mysterious, floating resonance – and you have something unique: there is nothing else like the wandering voice in nature. And when, down the years, it was paired, as an aural signal, with the eagerly awaited change of the turning year, the coming of spring, it's not an exaggeration to say that in Europe it became one of the most significant, evocative sounds in human life. It produced a stream of folklore in every country, sayings and stories, proverbs and legends; it inspired composer after composer, from Handel in his The Cuckoo and the Nightingale to Beethoven in his Pastoral Symphony, to Saint-Saëns in his Carnival of the Animals, to Delius with On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.

In Britain, it was firing musical imaginations more than six centuries before Frederick Delius; the cuckoo inspired the oldest extant song in English, "Sumer is icumen in" (with its rousing chorus of "Lhude sing cuccu!") written in about 1250, probably by a monk in Reading Abbey. And in this country it did still more: it triggered what is perhaps the most celebrated newspaper correspondence in history, the "first cuckoo" letters to The Times, those succinct missives from gentlemen who, for a century or so, from about 1840 to 1940, laid claim to being the first to hear the double note echo across the woods and fields in any given year.

These engaging pronouncements – sometimes challenged, sometimes topped by rivals – are evidence above all of the real elation produced by hearing the call, the supreme signal of the soft days coming again and the burgeoning of new life, usually in the first two weeks of April. From about the 10th onward, say. A typical date would be 14 April. Two or three weeks from now, you should be hearing it.

Listen to the spotted flycatcher

Except that you won't. Not in many places, certainly, where the cuckoo has been awaited and happily greeted time out of mind. For the bird is rapidly disappearing from Britain, at a scarcely conceivable rate, on a slope of decline leading the wandering voice inexorably towards silence. In many places, especially in southern England, it has gone altogether, leaving people who have keenly looked forward to its arrival perplexed and dismayed, in a way they hardly know how to articulate.

There is no conventional response to the situation of not hearing a cuckoo in spring where one has always been heard; it is new, and may seem trivial, but the people experiencing it sense profoundly that it is not trivial, even if they are unable to say why.

Yet the cuckoo is not alone. It is just the most prominent of a group of well-loved birds that are vanishing even more rapidly, not only in Britain, but Europe too. These are the birds that migrate to us from deep in Africa, where they spend the winter months, to nest and breed here in the summer; they bring us the spring in doing so.

These summer visitors – the spring-bringers, we might call them – include, besides the cuckoo, the most notable wild creatures in Western culture, such as the swallow, the nightingale, and the turtle dove, whose arrivals and performances have been celebrated for millennia. The purr of newly arrived turtle doves is famously heard in the Bible: "For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land." That was the poet who wrote The Song of Solomon, the Old Testament's most unusual but certainly its loveliest book, celebrating the light but penetrating purring sound filtering out of an olive grove or a vineyard, on an April day, in about 900BC, perhaps, after the bird's return to Israel from its winter quarters in somewhere like Ethiopia or the Sudan.

Nightingales produce an even more celebrated sound, for the short six weeks after they arrive back from somewhere like Nigeria or Ghana, which for 3,000 years has been held up as the quintessence of birdsong by all of civilised Europe; the bird has formed the basis of Greek and Roman myths and fables, similes by Chaucer, metaphors by Shakespeare and a wonderful ode by John Keats. Swallows, too, go back to the Bible; they flit through Greek and Latin literature as streamlined spring and summer emblems, swoop through Shakespeare and dip in and out of most of our other literature and folklore, to end up firmly perched on a proverb: one swallow doesn't make a summer. You know what it means. But it's wrong, really, because for many people one swallow does make a summer, in that as soon as they catch sight of their first one, all tail streamers and acrobatics, just back from Cape Town, they know with a rush of elation that the warm times are just around the corner.

Listen to the lapwing

The spring-bringers have such a resonance in European literature, legend and folklore that they have transcended national boundaries to become part of Europe's very essence, to become part of the continent's distinctive cultural furniture, as much as cathedrals, olive oil or wine. And there are more of them, which may not possess such an ancient cultural lineage but are widely and dearly loved: the willow warbler, with its silvery descending song, dropping down a full octave; the wood warbler, which trills and shakes its whole body as it does so; the spotted flycatcher, a plain but wonderfully sparky bird that likes to nest in old gardens; its cousin the pied flycatcher, a handsome black and white spirit of the western oak woods; the yellow wagtail, prettiest of all the birds of the farmland; and, swooping above us, the swift, the swallow-like dark scimitar silhouette in the blue summer skies.

All add immensely to the beauty and excitement of our natural world – and they are slipping away. In recent years, most of these birds have declined in a quite remarkable manner. The swallow is an exception – it seems to be holding its own in Britain (although it is declining in continental Europe). But, between 1994, when the British Trust for Ornithology and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds jointly instituted a new annual census of British birds, and 2007, the last year for which there is data, 37 per cent of our cuckoos vanished. So did 41 per cent of our swifts, 47 per cent of our yellow wagtails, 54 per cent of our pied flycatchers, 59 per cent of our spotted flycatchers, 60 per cent of our nightingales, 66 per cent of our turtle doves, and 67 per cent of our wood warblers. All gone in just 13 years; or, put another way, in the time since Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party.

If you delve deeper into the figures, the picture is more disturbing still: over the long term (since 1967), the cuckoo has declined by 59 per cent – three-fifths of Britain's cuckoos have vanished since The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper – while, over the same period, the loss of our turtle doves and of our spotted flycatchers comes out at 82 per cent and 84 per cent respectively.

Dig even deeper and it gets even worse: just between 2006 and 2007 there was a staggering decline in spotted flycatcher numbers of 41 per cent. Nearly half of them, gone in a year! This is the high road to extinction, and it is the case that for many of these birds the slopes of decline hit zero not very far in the future (it's happening in continental Europe too).

Yet the development as a whole, the mass decline of the summer migrants, has not impinged on the public consciousness at all, and indeed is only now being noticed by scientists.

For myself, when I became aware of it about 18 months ago, it struck me that it was not only cause for alarm, but that there was something singular about it, something peculiar about the potential loss of the spring-bringers that sets it apart from the other depressing wildlife declines we have become so familiar with. Heaven knows, these are dreadful enough. According to the 2008 Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 12 per cent of the world's birds, 21 per cent of its mammals, 30 per cent of its amphibians, 31 per cent of its reptiles, 37 per cent of its fishes and 70 per cent of its plant species are threatened with extinction.

The tigers are going, the orang-utans are going, the sea turtles are going, the albatrosses are going, the elephants are going, and most of the rhinos have gone. Even in Britain, with our wildlife on a much more modest scale, loss is ubiquitous: the wildflowers of our cornfields virtually extinguished, 70 per cent of our butterfly species dropping in numbers, and farmland birds in freefall: lapwings, corn buntings, grey partridges, skylarks, down, down, down.

You could see the loss of the spring-bringers as one more of these dispiriting declines; yet, to repeat, I felt there was something different about it, something even more troubling, which at the outset I couldn't put my finger on. It was something to do with their importance for us as humans, something to do with their meaning.

To try to get to the heart of it, and to get to the heart of the birds themselves and what they have meant and still may mean for us as people, I spent a springtime seeking them out – the spring of 2008.

It was a wonderful experience, because it took me into landscapes at the moment of their keenest beauty and showed me wildlife at the moment when it was most vibrantly alive. But, most of all, it let me see these animated small beings in terms of human responses to them. I came to understand, for example, why nightingales had inspired so much poetry – because once you got behind the cheesy sentimentality of the nightingale that sang in Berkeley Square and heard the real thing, singing clear-cut and liquid in the deep silence of a Surrey common at midnight, you understood what had fired up the poets: an overwhelming sense of wonder.

I came to see, listening in the Norfolk Broads, what the group of our smallest songbirds, the warblers, a dozen species of which fly in from Africa, added to our springtime: they made up a whole landscape in sound, the soundscape, you might say; while one of them, the wood warbler, was so beautiful, and was found in such beautiful settings (the Atlantic oak woods on the other side of Britain) that it seemed to bring the loveliness of the Welsh woodland where I watched it to a crowning and unforgettable expression. I understood, when I heard it in the Brecklands of Norfolk, why the Song of Solomon poet had been so taken with "the voice of the turtle", for the turtle dove's drowsy purr was really a sound of high summer, yet here you were hearing it in the spring – with all the promise of the lazy days to come. I started to comprehend, watching them closely in a Nottinghamshire village, why swallows were so special – because in places that are lucky enough to host them, they give the most exhilarating flight display, in their stunning navy blue livery, right on your doorstep; they decorate your air.

Listen to the wood warbler

I saw, in a series of Cotswold villages, that there was a special quality also to a bird not half so celebrated nor half so beautiful as the swallow. The spotted flycatcher entranced people lucky enough to have it nesting in their gardens with behaviour so distinctive that some of its admirers saw it not just as behaviour, but as character, stoic and self-possessed. I witnessed, from a garden in north London, a performance that seemed quite the opposite of that; the frenzied aerial dance of the swifts in their evening "screaming parties", a wildness that gives them a great mystique for us today, in a way that calmer ages never seem to have appreciated.

Finally, in the fens of Cambridgeshire and in other places across the land, I heard the bell-like wandering voice of the cuckoo, and I felt elated by it every time, realising fully how, of all the signals of spring, this one was indeed supreme – in the places where it still could be found.

For it was melting away, as many of the spring-bringers were melting away. Just why were they vanishing? I thought hard about what they all shared, which may be behind the disappearances – their migrant identity, their place in the vast aerial river of birds which, every spring, pours out of the wintering grounds in Africa to nest in Europe. It is a stupendous natural phenomenon, on a par with the Gulf Stream or the Indian monsoon, reliably estimated to contain as many as five billion birds, of nearly 200 species, with perhaps 16 million of them, of about 50 species, heading for Britain.

To get here, every one faces the most daunting of journeys; in each case, a personal struggle to cross enormous obstacles, such as the Sahara desert or the Mediterranean, whose outcome depends on bodily fuel reserves, the ability to navigate and the maintenance of great effort over long periods.

It is quite possible that changing conditions in Africa, either on the birds' wintering grounds or on their migration routes, may be behind the migrants' demise. Environmental degradation is spreading rapidly across the African continent, as a report from the UN last year made only too clear. But, although investigations are under way, no one yet really knows; it is equally possible that changing conditions on their summer breeding ranges here in Europe may be responsible.

Two particular theories stand out as possible explanations: insect decline, and climate change. The first has been dramatic: although the public doesn't give a hoot, there have been enormous shrinkages in our insect populations over the past 50 years, caused principally by the great tide of pesticides that has washed over the land – the insect food for many birds is getting scarcer and scarcer.

The second is a question of mismatched timing: many of the insects that do remain are emerging earlier because of rising temperatures, and it may be the case that migratory birds are now coming back too late to take advantage of their peak.

Listen to the willow warbler

But none of this is settled. The one certainty is that, led by the cuckoo, the spring-bringers are rapidly being lost from our lives. I gradually began to focus less on the causes of it and more on the meaning – trying to work out why this particular wildlife loss seemed more disturbing than the others.

These birds mattered to us, I knew from the outset, because they signalled the most marvellous of all the season changes, and to hear the cuckoo, say, for the first time in a given spring was a moment of true exhilaration. Yet underlying the exhilaration there was something more, something deeper than mere delight; and eventually I realised that it was not simply the fact of the birds' arrival, and its marking of the seasonal shift, tremendous though that was – it was the recurring nature of this event.

For, in coming back year after year after year, against all the odds they face, the spring migrants are testaments to the earth's great cycle. They remind us that although death is certain, renewal is eternal; that although all life ends, new life comes as well. Perhaps what they mean to us, really, is hope – every one of the whole 16 million a feathered piece of hope, fresh from Africa.

Listen to the skylark

But if the birds don't come back, then something is going awry at the heart of things. Something is going wrong with the earth's great cycle, something is going wrong with the spring itself – something is going wrong with the very working of the world.

Spinning around at a thousand miles an hour, on its axis tilted at 23 degrees to the plane of its orbit around the Sun, the earth in its motions has always seemed dependable to the last degree. In human history it has always worked entirely reliably, giving us day and then night, spring and then summer, autumn and then winter, with a regularity so unshakeable that these are the only real certainties, apart from death itself, in our uncertain lives.

That any of this should alter, other than on the Day of Judgement, has never been part of our intellectual currency. But here we have one of the world's profoundest motions, a living announcement of spring, coming to an end.

We have grown used to wildlife losses, but it will be far more than the loss of a species to say goodbye to the cuckoo, and to bid farewell to its fellow summer visitors, as we are now on course to do sooner rather than later. It will be something so momentous in its implications that perhaps it is better not to think it through.

'Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo' by Michael McCarthy (£16.99) is published by John Murray on 2 April. To place an advance order for a copy at the special price of £14.99 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897 or visit www. independentbooksdirect.co.uk

All audio clips are the copyright of the RSPB www.rspb.org.uk

Switch your Gas & Electricity and save up to £380 with Independent Compare