Cuckoos hit the headlines

It was a busy old time at the RSPB this week with newspapers, TV and radio crews all clamouring for a glimpse of the increasingly elusive cuckoo.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole in the ground – or maybe just returned from a trip to the outer solar system – you will have seen the news this week that cuckoos have been added to the Red List of the UK's most threatened bird species.

Satellite news broadcast trucks rolled onto the RSPB's headquarters at Sandy and the Barnes wetland reserve in West London. Our director of conservation Mark Avery and species monitoring expert Richard Gregory must have felt like celebrities as they rushed from one journalist to the next for interviews with everyone from Sky News and ITN to the BBC’s Newsnight as well as all the national newspapers. There’s a list of links below if you want to see how the story was covered.

It was picked up even further a field including the Boston Globe, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times of Malta. The Independent even managed to tie the story in with the ongoing political expenses row when their cartoonist Dave Brown drew embattled MP Julie Kirkbride as a cuckoo sitting on a nest full of cash.

So why has the plight of this single species created such a major stir and captured everyone’s attention?

The cuckoo makes one of the natural world’s most instantly recognisable sounds - any schoolboy will tell you it’s the male bird’s two note call that gives the species its name - and it's this call which for many is the traditional harbinger of spring. It also nests right across the UK - as a result it has entered the national psyche and become part of our shared heritage.

Everyone has their own personal connection with this cheeky bird – and everyone would feel the sad loss if it were to disappear.

BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.