Great Spotted Cuckoo – Dawlish Warren Local Nature Reserve, Dawlish, Devon, 25^th March 1990

Another!! Two difficult birds in one weekend! The day after the Bonaparte’s Gull on the lake in Abbey Fields, Kenilworth in Warwickshire we took different motorways – the M25, M4 and M5 south-west from St Albans to Exeter and beyond to Dawlish and Dawlish Warren in Devon, where the object of our mission had been since Tuesday the 20th March. Why we saw the Bonaparte’s Gull on the Saturday and the Great Spotted Cuckoo on the Sunday when both were available of both days is not evident at this remove. Perhaps it was Pete Ewer’s idea of crowd management.

Once again, like the twitch the previous day, we saw very little other than our target but that was more than enough.

We watched it both feeding on the ground amongst the sand-dune vegetation, when it had an upright stance and an ambling, somewhat ponderous gait, as it picked off and devoured hairy caterpillars, and flying over the sand dunes, when, if not struggling against the wind, it had a rapid twisting flight.

It had buffy-white under-parts and collar and grey-brown upper-parts with white barring / spotting on the coverts, etc.. It also had russet primaries and a very long graduated brown tail. It had a contrasting dark brown hood (which was similarly extensive like that of the Sardinian Warbler of a few weeks earlier) which was ‘punk’ spiky.

Great Spotted Cuckoo, Dawlish Warren, Devon, March 1990 (photograph credited to Pete Wheeler).