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Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo
Seen as a whole, if they all arrived in a single flock, it would be truly amazing: 16 million birds. Swallows, martins, swifts, warblers, wagtails, wheatears, cuckoos, chats, nightingales, nightjars, thrushes, pipits, and flycatchers pouring into Britain from sub-Saharan Africa. It is one of the enduring wonders of the natural world. Each bird faces the most daunting of journeys—navigating epic distances, dependent on bodily fuel reserves. Yet none can refuse. Since pterodactyls flew, twice-yearly odysseys have been the lot of migrant birds. For millennia, the Great Arrival has been celebrated. From The Song of Solomon, through Keats' Ode On a Nightingale, to our thrill at hearing the first cuckoo call each year, the spring-bringers are timeless heralds of shared seasonal joy. Yet, as climate change escalates migrant birds are finding it increasingly hard to make the perilous journeys across the African desert. This is a moving call to arms by an impassioned expert—get outside, teach your children about these birds, don't let them disappear from our shores and hearts.
246 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2009
8 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
About the author
Michael McCarthy
420 books56 followersMichael McCarthy is an English writer on the environment and the natural world. He was formerly Environment Editor for the Independent and is now its Environment Columnist.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
February 21, 2012
This is a book which for a severely amateur birdwatcher like myself was a mixed blessing. The whole concept of the study was Michael McCarthy's trawl around the UK searching out the 'harbingers of Spring'(good thing, an encouragement to enjoy their beauty) just before their numbers plummet to such an extent that they are no more(Bad thing; thank you so very much Mr McCarthy that really sets me up for April).
He searches out and makes a study part anecdotal, part scientific, part poetic, part experience. His style is easy and informative and his love of the natural world shines out enthusiastically and his account is peppered with the world of poetry and other literary allusions but without becoming pretentious or heavy-handed.
He looks at the present state of various birds from the Nightingale and the Cuckoo to the Sedge warbler and the Spotted Flycatcher. He comes close up and fairly personal with nesting Swifts, an experience i would sell a few of my first edition Muriel Sparks to pay for (No honestly, it would be that wonderful)and encounters swallows and turtle doves. It is a wonderful hike through the little known histories of some of these birds and he does it with an enthusiasm you catch and with human encounters with various experts and committed amateurs.
His intention is
'not only to find the birds - itself not always a straightforward task -but, beyond that, to get to the heart of what they meant and still may mean to people '
There are some wonderfully bizarre snippets of info along the way showing how our understanding of the natural world sometimes came on not so much in leaps and bounds but rather as stumblings across clues which were picked up totally by chance. The most weird being the german nobleman who shoots a weird looking white stork off his castle only to find that its weirdness is due to an arrow impaled in its throat. This arrow is found to have been fired by an African hunter a coup;le of thousand miles away and was the beginning of proof that birds did indeed migrate enormous distances and did not, as was often thought, hibernate.
The call and song of so many birds is a wonder and something we take for granted but one of McCarthy's experts talks of it being much more than that. The little sedge warbler, renowned for its abilities to mimic and copy is astounding but what is more amazing is the realization that the mimicry is not necessarily its own personal invention but sometimes something inherited from previous birds.
'So the real greenshank behind the mimicry could have been one that landed here this morning or it could have been hundreds of years ago and the imitation passed on from sedge warbler to sedge warbler. These are ancient sounds ' and then comes the wonder to me
'Yoou think you are hearing now but in fact you are hearing the past. You're hearing the aural history of the bird and its relation to this landscape. You're hearing the history of the landscape itself'.
It is this wonderful link and mystery which is therefore in danger of disappearing. McCarthy hints and nudges his reader along the road to this realization and then, in the last few chapters, bashes you about the head, none too subtlely with stastistics and doom laden pronouncements. He is on a mission to inform and warn and I can fully appreciate the need but the tragedy is he only serves to depress because there is nothing any normal person seems to be able to do. I fill up my feeders each day and enjoy a goodly number of various birds flocking to them. I have 7 different bird boxes placed around my house and garden and hope they will be of use but McCarthy gives no real comfort or hope to us mere mortals. I realize false hope is no hope but to delve out notes on horror and destruction but with no pointers to what we can do to help seems just depressing.
He has a lovely turn of phrase and creates lovely pictures in your mind of vanising beauty;
'A Day, hot, clear, still, it did not really belong to spring, it was an interloper from mid-July with unfettered sunlight poured upon the face of the earth until everything seemed to glow - most of all the may blossom, which turned the hedges into great white ribbons streaming across the land'.
This is a truly lovely book written by a man who quite clearly is deeply in love with all things natural and especially the birds of Spring but I still do wish he had given us some glimpse of hope, something we could do; for as it is i leave the book frustrated and deeply sad that my great nephews and nieces, just venturing into the world, may grow to old age in a world forever silenced.
ps. One teensy weensy little point. Dear Mr McCarthy when you come to next edition, 'a Great British tradition' on page 184 is tea at FOUR o'clock not, for Heaven's sake, FIVE. The world may be careering to hell in a handcart but tea is at 4 never 5.
He searches out and makes a study part anecdotal, part scientific, part poetic, part experience. His style is easy and informative and his love of the natural world shines out enthusiastically and his account is peppered with the world of poetry and other literary allusions but without becoming pretentious or heavy-handed.
He looks at the present state of various birds from the Nightingale and the Cuckoo to the Sedge warbler and the Spotted Flycatcher. He comes close up and fairly personal with nesting Swifts, an experience i would sell a few of my first edition Muriel Sparks to pay for (No honestly, it would be that wonderful)and encounters swallows and turtle doves. It is a wonderful hike through the little known histories of some of these birds and he does it with an enthusiasm you catch and with human encounters with various experts and committed amateurs.
His intention is
'not only to find the birds - itself not always a straightforward task -but, beyond that, to get to the heart of what they meant and still may mean to people '
There are some wonderfully bizarre snippets of info along the way showing how our understanding of the natural world sometimes came on not so much in leaps and bounds but rather as stumblings across clues which were picked up totally by chance. The most weird being the german nobleman who shoots a weird looking white stork off his castle only to find that its weirdness is due to an arrow impaled in its throat. This arrow is found to have been fired by an African hunter a coup;le of thousand miles away and was the beginning of proof that birds did indeed migrate enormous distances and did not, as was often thought, hibernate.
The call and song of so many birds is a wonder and something we take for granted but one of McCarthy's experts talks of it being much more than that. The little sedge warbler, renowned for its abilities to mimic and copy is astounding but what is more amazing is the realization that the mimicry is not necessarily its own personal invention but sometimes something inherited from previous birds.
'So the real greenshank behind the mimicry could have been one that landed here this morning or it could have been hundreds of years ago and the imitation passed on from sedge warbler to sedge warbler. These are ancient sounds ' and then comes the wonder to me
'Yoou think you are hearing now but in fact you are hearing the past. You're hearing the aural history of the bird and its relation to this landscape. You're hearing the history of the landscape itself'.
It is this wonderful link and mystery which is therefore in danger of disappearing. McCarthy hints and nudges his reader along the road to this realization and then, in the last few chapters, bashes you about the head, none too subtlely with stastistics and doom laden pronouncements. He is on a mission to inform and warn and I can fully appreciate the need but the tragedy is he only serves to depress because there is nothing any normal person seems to be able to do. I fill up my feeders each day and enjoy a goodly number of various birds flocking to them. I have 7 different bird boxes placed around my house and garden and hope they will be of use but McCarthy gives no real comfort or hope to us mere mortals. I realize false hope is no hope but to delve out notes on horror and destruction but with no pointers to what we can do to help seems just depressing.
He has a lovely turn of phrase and creates lovely pictures in your mind of vanising beauty;
'A Day, hot, clear, still, it did not really belong to spring, it was an interloper from mid-July with unfettered sunlight poured upon the face of the earth until everything seemed to glow - most of all the may blossom, which turned the hedges into great white ribbons streaming across the land'.
This is a truly lovely book written by a man who quite clearly is deeply in love with all things natural and especially the birds of Spring but I still do wish he had given us some glimpse of hope, something we could do; for as it is i leave the book frustrated and deeply sad that my great nephews and nieces, just venturing into the world, may grow to old age in a world forever silenced.
ps. One teensy weensy little point. Dear Mr McCarthy when you come to next edition, 'a Great British tradition' on page 184 is tea at FOUR o'clock not, for Heaven's sake, FIVE. The world may be careering to hell in a handcart but tea is at 4 never 5.
July 16, 2013
Most of the book takes different birds (bringers of spring) and describes what makes them special. His writing is tender, passionate. But in the final chapters it becomes clear that each of the species described - the nightingale, the cuckoo, the swift, to name a few - are declining drastically. He is honest that the reasons aren't entirely known, but the causes seem to be a combination of habitat destruction and global warming. McCarthy attempts to bring attention to this disaster that is occurring while everyone has their attention diverted by iPads and tv.
November 16, 2025
Very enjoyable and enthusiastic, especially the author's accounts of finding the migrant birds. I feel the section on their decline and reasons why is rushed though, and given the thesis of the book, deserved as much attention as the encounters themselves. A fun read though, he really brings out the character of each species.
June 10, 2023
This is a beautiful, informative, inspiring and important book with a crucial message. What will the world be like without the "spring bringers"? Can we save the migratory birds that mean so much to our culture, and have done, as the wealth of references show, for centuries?
One to re-read.
One to re-read.
September 28, 2010
An eye-opening book about the disappearance of the spring-bringers, the birds which migrate over thousands of miles every year. It is a beautiful book, and I only wish I could heard the sound of the wood-warbler.
May 19, 2025
This a beautiful, but sobering book about the UK's Spring migrants, which make up about a quarter of all our bird species.
"If we could see it as a whole, if they all arrived in a single flood, say, and they came in the day instead of the night, we would be truly amazed." From this opening onwards, this is a celebration of the wonders of the birds who visit our shores to breed and who then leave again to escape our winters. It's also a call for us all (not just birdwatchers) to notice these birds again and to conserve them before they disappear from our skies.
The book looks at not only the natural history of several of our migrant songbirds, but also considers their cultural impact, from the immortalisation of Nightingales in poetry and song, to our contradictory feelings about Cuckoos being both the harbingers of Spring (due to their song) and their being symbols of deception (for laying their eggs in other birds' nests).
The author travels throughout England and visits Gibraltar (a crossing point for many species migrating from Africa to Europe), in search of migrant songbirds, meeting scientists, conservation workers and gardeners. He also outlines some of the biology involved in migration and some of the history of how scientists learned about migration from Aristotle's early observations, to Gilbert White, the first person to really record detailed notes about the arrivals of local birds in his Natural History of Selbourne, published in 1789 and coming up to date with a brief history of bird ringing (banding in the US) and how that has helped work out migration routes.
The largest part of the book focuses in detail on selected species of the UK Spring migrants, including Swallow, Wood Warbler and Turtle Dove. His writing is full of enthusiasm and wonder, the joy of listening to the songs of these migrants, because their songs are such a part of our experience of the natural world in Spring. I love the description of listening to the Sedge Warbler as he mimics a variety of other species of birds, so well that at one point McCarthy looks around for the passing Greenshank and has to be reminded that the sound is coming from the Sedge Warbler.
There are stories of conservation efforts throughout the book, including Edward Mayer, who spends most of his time campaigning to conserve Swifts, including installing swift nest boxes on buildings across London; and the villagers in Worcestershire who got together to record and conserve the Spotted Flycatchers in their area.
The final two chapters look in more detail at the threats facing out Spring migrants, from loss of nesting sites here, through the lack of insects and other food sources to the degradation of the habitat in the birds' wintering grounds and the effect of climate change on the timing of natural events (many caterpillars no appear earlier than they used to, but the migrants aren't able to alter their journey times to keep up with the peak supply of their food sources). Bird surveying is highlighted as being vital if we are to understand what is happening to bird populations.
"Over thosands of years [these birds] have inspired us to poetry and prompted us to proverbs, they have been the source of a vast treasury of European folklore, legends and literature, and they have been so woven into the fabric of our culture as to become part of the continent's idea of itself. A Europe without its Spring-bringers is almost as unthinkable as a Europe without its cathedrals."
Yet, with the numbers of so many of these migrant birds plummeting as they are, are we actually approaching a time when we will find ourselves saying goodbye to the cuckoo?
"If we could see it as a whole, if they all arrived in a single flood, say, and they came in the day instead of the night, we would be truly amazed." From this opening onwards, this is a celebration of the wonders of the birds who visit our shores to breed and who then leave again to escape our winters. It's also a call for us all (not just birdwatchers) to notice these birds again and to conserve them before they disappear from our skies.
The book looks at not only the natural history of several of our migrant songbirds, but also considers their cultural impact, from the immortalisation of Nightingales in poetry and song, to our contradictory feelings about Cuckoos being both the harbingers of Spring (due to their song) and their being symbols of deception (for laying their eggs in other birds' nests).
The author travels throughout England and visits Gibraltar (a crossing point for many species migrating from Africa to Europe), in search of migrant songbirds, meeting scientists, conservation workers and gardeners. He also outlines some of the biology involved in migration and some of the history of how scientists learned about migration from Aristotle's early observations, to Gilbert White, the first person to really record detailed notes about the arrivals of local birds in his Natural History of Selbourne, published in 1789 and coming up to date with a brief history of bird ringing (banding in the US) and how that has helped work out migration routes.
The largest part of the book focuses in detail on selected species of the UK Spring migrants, including Swallow, Wood Warbler and Turtle Dove. His writing is full of enthusiasm and wonder, the joy of listening to the songs of these migrants, because their songs are such a part of our experience of the natural world in Spring. I love the description of listening to the Sedge Warbler as he mimics a variety of other species of birds, so well that at one point McCarthy looks around for the passing Greenshank and has to be reminded that the sound is coming from the Sedge Warbler.
There are stories of conservation efforts throughout the book, including Edward Mayer, who spends most of his time campaigning to conserve Swifts, including installing swift nest boxes on buildings across London; and the villagers in Worcestershire who got together to record and conserve the Spotted Flycatchers in their area.
The final two chapters look in more detail at the threats facing out Spring migrants, from loss of nesting sites here, through the lack of insects and other food sources to the degradation of the habitat in the birds' wintering grounds and the effect of climate change on the timing of natural events (many caterpillars no appear earlier than they used to, but the migrants aren't able to alter their journey times to keep up with the peak supply of their food sources). Bird surveying is highlighted as being vital if we are to understand what is happening to bird populations.
"Over thosands of years [these birds] have inspired us to poetry and prompted us to proverbs, they have been the source of a vast treasury of European folklore, legends and literature, and they have been so woven into the fabric of our culture as to become part of the continent's idea of itself. A Europe without its Spring-bringers is almost as unthinkable as a Europe without its cathedrals."
Yet, with the numbers of so many of these migrant birds plummeting as they are, are we actually approaching a time when we will find ourselves saying goodbye to the cuckoo?
June 27, 2020
This is an informative book about the disappearing species of birds, because of global warming and other threats to the environment. The author is British and his focus is primarily on birds of the eastern hemisphere, but I still found his book painfully relevant and very timely. If you are interested in birds and the problem surviving they are increasingly facing, you won't want to miss reading this book.
August 17, 2018
Not "well-written." The prose is a bit purple, and people think that equates to being well-written. It's not badly written. It's OK. Halfway through, I took a break from the elitism (and this guy has a true disdain for regular people's culture) to read something else, but then life happened and I have to give it back to the person I've borrowed it from. It won't kill me to leave it be.
July 21, 2019
A very fascinating read! I feel like I learned so much reading this. Michael McCarthy has a wonderful talent for conveying facts without them coming across at all dry. I enjoyed in particular the chapters on cuckoos and swifts. Bird migration is a truly wonderful, miraculous phenomenon, and it is sad that the numbers of birds making these migrations are dwindling.
June 7, 2020
I found this to be a very difficult book to read. It is rough to give nightmares to the toughest of us!
It spells out the destruction to the earth humans have wrought and the impending feeling of doom, predicted by the decimated numbers of birds in our world.
Intriguing and heart breaking. Took me forever to read because I could only absorb in small doses!
It spells out the destruction to the earth humans have wrought and the impending feeling of doom, predicted by the decimated numbers of birds in our world.
Intriguing and heart breaking. Took me forever to read because I could only absorb in small doses!
June 15, 2020
One of the best natural history titles I have ever read. Highly recommend it
August 13, 2011
In Alaska we have a huge migratory bird population; landbirds, shorebirds, seabirds, raptors, waterfowl that come to our millions of acres of wetlands. This book is about the birds in England that migrate from Africa, so many of the species it talks about are not found here, but the journey is similar. Birds coming to Alaska pass through almost every other state in the Union, including Hawaii, to get here. Talking about migration even though it's different routes and species than what I see here is universal underneath it all. The book talked about changes that affect birds and how the loss of a species can have a cultural impact on humans.
September 26, 2015
I loved this book. It is detail-rich, but this adds weight to the story of these 2 women's lives, and how their interactions, and their very different reactions to their shared family history, stimulated them to reach the highest in their different fields, but also gave them individually, the greatest of joy and the deepest of pain.
This is a story of two lives well lived, but flawed. It is perhaps more extreme than the average person, but it goes to the heart of what it is to be human.
This is a story of two lives well lived, but flawed. It is perhaps more extreme than the average person, but it goes to the heart of what it is to be human.
September 6, 2011
Brilliant but terrifying.
Really well written.
Really well written.
July 14, 2012
Brilliant and very sad. I have missed the cuckoos, swallows and swifts this year and this book tells me why they and our other beautiful trans-Saharan migrants are in freefall.
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May 1, 2017Edition: 1st ed.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews