The Mongolia Cuckoo Project

The Project

The story moves to the Mongolian steppe

The Beijing Cuckoo Project had revealed that Beijing's cuckoos winter in Africa. But how far did that pattern reach? In June 2019, the team travelled to the Khurkh Bird Banding Center in northern Mongolia to find out — fitting satellite tags to five more cuckoos, including, for the first time anywhere, an Oriental Cuckoo.

From 4–8 June 2019, one Oriental Cuckoo and four Common Cuckoos were tagged around Khurkh. As in Beijing, local schoolchildren named the birds and followed "their" cuckoos through the seasons. What followed was another extraordinary demonstration of endurance — and, in ONON, one of the most complete migration journeys ever recorded for the species.

Milestones

The story, flight by flight

Why It Mattered

A shared bird, a shared responsibility

The Mongolia project confirmed and extended what Beijing had revealed: that cuckoos breeding across East Asia undertake one of the natural world's great journeys, wintering in Africa via an epic crossing of the Arabian Sea. Tracking an Oriental Cuckoo for the first time opened an entirely new line of enquiry.

But the project also carried a clear message. These birds are shared by every country along their route — from Mongolia to Mozambique — and that shared ownership brings a shared responsibility to protect the habitats they depend on. As the team wrote when Bayan was feared lost, if greater awareness of that responsibility is his legacy, then his life had strong purpose and meaning. The same is true of them all.

These birds are shared by all of us in the countries along the route — from Mongolia to Mozambique.

A Friendship Across A Flyway

How a cuckoo connected children in Mongolia and Socotra

On 27 November 2019, the cuckoo named Namjaa — Mongolian for "storyteller" — briefly touched down on Socotra, the remote Yemeni island in the Arabian Sea, some 240 km off the coast of Somalia. That single stopover set in motion one of the most moving episodes of the whole project.

Learning that "their" cuckoo had rested on the island, schoolchildren from Binder and Khurkh villages in north-east Mongolia wrote letters to children on Socotra — to thank them for the safe passage of the cuckoos, and to tell them how important their island is for the millions of migratory birds that cross the Arabian Sea each year.

A few days later, the children of Socotra — at schools in Hadibo — had the letters read aloud by their teachers, and wrote back with letters and drawings of their own, sharing the island's own wonders: the Egyptian Vulture they call "Su'aidoo," the extraordinary Dragon Blood Tree, and the 141 bird species that make Socotra a World Heritage Site.

Socotra is a World Heritage Site, but with Yemen's civil war and the collapse of tourism, conservation is a daily struggle. It is hoped these letters from far-away Mongolia help raise awareness of the island's importance to migratory birds — and support those working, in the hardest of circumstances, to protect it.

With thanks to WSCC and Tuvshinjargal Erdenechimeg for facilitating the letters from Mongolia, and to Richard Porter and Karim Nasher — one of Yemen's leading conservationists — for arranging their delivery to Socotra and sending the replies.