After he’d reached Cameroon in early March, we hadn’t received any signals from Ashok’s tag until this morning. 

It would appear that rather than heading west to join the other Cuckoos, he took off north across the central Sahara at some point in the last week, arriving in north-eastern Algeria. Since then he powered purposefully on, crossed the Mediterranean and arrived in the Almería region of south-east Spain yesterday evening!  

Ashok is not only the first of our tagged Cuckoos to arrive in Europe this spring but this is also the earliest ever date that one of our satellite tagged birds has done so.     

We last received a signal from Irish Cuckoo Cores’ tag in late autumn, after he’d successfully crossed the Sahara on 27 October and he was in southern Chad. Despite regular checks over the winter, we’ve heard nothing, and it looked as though he’d either failed to get into the Congo, or that we were possibly having problems with his tag as sensor data indicated possible battery charging issues. 

Then, out of the blue, we received a signal on 19 March! And he was in Ghana. Presumably, he’d spent the last four months in the Congolese forests as usual, and now that he was on his way his tag was functioning again and providing us with his whereabouts. He has spent the last few days around the western fringes of the massive Lake Volta in eastern Ghana. 

Oddly enough this Cuckoo’s tag did something similar last year. Cores went ‘offline’ in Central African Republic in November 2024 and sprang back into life in early April 2025 in Algeria!

Since our last update from Frederic in early March, he has continued to move at a relatively relaxed pace, passing up through western Central African Republic and across Cameroon. He is currently close to the Nigerian border, in the southern foothills of the vast Mambilla Plateau.