Having had the opportunity to scrutinise the data from the past few days, we can confirm that Indy does indeed appear to have been over the Mediterranean Sea, south of Sicily and only 154km (95 miles) from the coast of Libya, early in the morning of Monday 23 July. Locations received in the first few hours after dawn suggest that he was heading ENE and then due N – back towards Italy – at that time. We know Indy would have encountered a strong headwind if he was originally heading south at this time, so he may turned north in reaction to this when finding himself over the sea and out of sight of land at dawn, presumably having assessed his body fuel reserves as being inadequate. However, we can’t rule out the possibility he may have been returning north having previously made landfall in Libya or Tunisia. Certainly at this time of year there will be few re-fuelling opportunities in North Africa east of the Atlas Mountains.
Remarkably, Indy then continued northwards and was approximately 110km (67 miles) NW of Rome by the evening of Wednesday 25 July. Yesterday evening (27 July) we received new locations for Indy which placed him back in the Po watershed, 16km (10 miles) north of Alessandria, exactly where he first pitched up almost four weeks ago and where he had been last present nine days previously on 18 July! During this period he has made a round trip in excess of 3,000km (1864 miles) which took him almost to Africa before returning north to Italy and right back to his starting location near Alessandria.
As noted in previous blogs, we have seen several examples of round trips by Cuckoos but all previous ones have been much shorter than this one. In most cases, we think this has occurred when a Cuckoo has failed to find suitable foraging locations after moving on to a new area. We assume Indy had completed the preparations for his desert crossing before moving south from the Po watershed. We can only assume that Indy’s fuel reserves were inadequate for a successful desert crossing (possibly partly due to the headwind he may have encountered) so he has returned to the area he had been fuelling in, even though it was 900 miles back to the north, because he was not aware of suitable areas further south. Certainly we expect that, south of the Po watershed, all areas will be very dry at this time of year and the favourite food of Cuckoos – caterpillars – will be very scarce.
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