Five cuckoos had been recently trending on social media as followers tracked the travels of these satellite-tagged birds. Scientists from the Mongolia Cuckoo Project are calling this 'a mammoth journey.'
This initiative is the teamwork of several organizations - the Wildlife Science and Conservation Center (WSCC) of Mongolia, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), Birding Beijing, and the Oriental Bird Club. Together, they've been keeping track of one oriental cuckoo and four common cuckoos.
The video shows the most recent location of ONON
The only oriental cuckoo and first of its kind to be tracked is Nomad (Mongolian name: нүүдэлчин), a male bird. His travel was measured to be 300km at a time where voters predicted he would either land in Africa, Australia, or South East Asia. The team last pick up his signal on October 4, 2019 where he reached Hubei Province, China.
Khyrkh's, or Captain (Хурх in Mongolian), translates to 'boldly going where no cuckoo has gone before.' His last known position was in China's Yunnan Province where the team believes his mission may have ended on October 10, 2019. Captain Khyrkh traveled 800km to his last know location from Guizhou where all four common cuckoos remarkably landed in early September.
Namjaa, the name of a Mongolian folklore storyteller, brought updates to the satellite tracker until March 20 this year. He was in Kenya around Christmas time with Onon and Bayan, the next two common cuckoos. To reach the African coast from India, Namjaa covered a distance of 4,000km in four days to Somalia and traveled another 1000km to Kenya.
Bayan, or Prosper in English, flew 10,000 km in a fortnight. The team hoped that his tracker fell off when they no longer received signals from the common cuckoo, yet they also predicted that he could have been attacked by a predator or died from exhaustion.
What is Migration?
'Animal migration has fascinated humans for millennia,' wrote Silke Nebel, Biologist, from the Nature Education Knowledge journal. The phenomenon is said to attract 'the most interest among non-scientists' because of 'astonishing feats of endurance.'
What's unique to migration compared to other movements is that animals travel 'from one type of habitat to another,' states the journal.
The greatest bird migration recorded is the 40,000km early flight of North American Arctic terns, a white seabird. In its lifetime of 25 years, Arctic terns can fly almost three times the distance from the moon to the Earth.
A social media follower of the great cuckoo migration responded, 'Love this... the little guy is doing all the flying we can't do! Bringing us places. Thanks for sharing!'
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Best for Last
Only one cuckoo accomplished the return journey, Onon, named after a Mongolian river.
Starting in Zambia, Onon flew more than 12,000km to migrate towards home, traversing 16 nations, an epic feat.
Dr. Chris Hewson from BTO shared 'I think the big takeaway is that the birds can travel so far and often so fast that they must be able to find suitable conditions for fattening and also know exactly where to go to get favorable wind conditions to help them, for instance, to cross the Indian Ocean.'
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