The call of the cuckoo is surely one of the most evocative sounds of spring. The one bird song that most people in RCT will know, even if they have never heard one in the wild. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are hearing cuckoos in RCT. These summer migrants, that spend just a few spring and early summer months with us, are in sharp decline in our part of Wales. The reasons are a complex combination of climate and habitat change in this country and similar changes in the bird’s migratory and wintering habitats. The result in RCT is that the bird is rarely heard in the lowland, southern third of the County Borough, places that until 25 years ago still has cuckoos laying eggs in the nests of unsuspecting dunnocks. Today RCT has only a dozen or so call calling cuckoos, and these are restricted to the Valley ffridd and uplands where they parasitise meadow pipit nests. So, if you can still hear cuckoos from your doorstep in the Rhondda or Cynon Valleys that is because we still have meadow pipits nesting on our valley sides and uplands. Work has shown that cuckoo’s that parasitise meadow pipits need a landscape area of 300 hectares of meadow pipit habitat. Meadow pipits are themselves in decline and they need open acid grassland, bogs and heathy habitat to breed. Looking at an ordnance survey map of RCT it is clear that there is only enough suitable open ffridd and upland habitat to support the dozen or so cuckoos that we still have. Unfortunately, a greater part of our uplands is now conifer plantation and is no longer suitable for cuckoos. So, if we want to retain cuckoos as a sound of spring, a sound that our ancestors heard every spring since the glaciers rolled back 10,000 years ago, we need to value, conserve and look after our meadow pipits and their ffridd and open upland habitats.