I have had one ear open for the last couple of weeks ready to hear the first calls of the Cuckoo. On Saturday while wandering through the woods I gave a little gasp of delight as I heard the Cuckoo’s distinctive calls.  It was a lovely sunshiny day and the Cuckoo called merrily away at some distance, never close and I wondered whether I would see it.

While playing in the woods a couple of fellas I was chatting to pointed out the Cuckoo as it flew past, but of course it was much too fast and through all those branches impossible to photograph.

At the end of the afternoon I was enjoying a lovely sit down in the sunshine, listening to the warblers and waiting for one or two to pop up out of the reeds whilst at the same time listening to the odd call from a Cuckoo, when a friend wandered by and stopped for a chat.

And as we chatted and waited for warblers he noticed at great distance a blob on the top of a dead tree and immediately said ‘that’s a Cuckoo’ I exclaimed with, ‘how do you even know at this distance!’.  So I took a snap and blew it up and sure enough there were the distinctive bars on the breast of a Cuckoo. Wow, even double Wow as it is my first ever Cuckoo photograph.

The next day, gossip was rife with the boys at the nature reserve and they merrily ribbed me about my blob of a Cuckoo, even casting aspersions as to the calibre of my accomplice who had pointed it out…  How I laughed, as I recognised the lightest twinge of envy that the newbie had snapped the first Cuckoo of the season.

My first Cuckoo, it was a thing of beauty.