Page 62 - NT 2022 Almanac

The birds are getting noisier now! You might find that you are woken up earlier by the sound of a wood pigeon cooing loudly outside your window. Then other smaller birds join in with their different sounds. This is called the ‘dawn chorus’. If you’ve got time in the morning,
it’s lovely to lie in bed and just listen to the music the birds make – it’s like having a free concert right outside your window!
More and more birds are finding their way back to Britain after the winter. Look out for the first swallows, swifts and house martins later in the month.
Swallow
The bird that people think of most in April is the cuckoo. It spends the winter in Africa but comes back to Britain during this month.
Swift
House martin
Cuckoo
It is traditional for people to write to The Times newspaper when they hear the first cuckoo of spring!
Each spring a female will lay between 12 and 22 eggs, all in other birds’ nests.
A female cuckoo will lay her eggs in a nest belonging to the same kind of bird that looked after her when she was a chick.
Adult cuckoos move back to Africa as soon as their chicks are hatched. This can be as early as the end of June.
Young cuckoos follow their parents back to Africa several weeks later.
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