It was a dull Saturday afternoon in early June as I glanced out of my dining room window towards the moor and saw what I first assumed to be a kestrel sitting on the gatepost. But no, I’d made a mistake in identification… despite being mobbed by a meadow pipit, the beak was wrong, the body not quite right and it was then that I recognised it as a cuckoo.  We have them here each spring, the male frequenting the trees around the house on first arrival and for several years there was one that made me laugh with his vocal tic; cuck-squeak, cuck-squeak rather than the more familiar cuckoo call.

As I watched, this bird patrolled the fence posts between my garden and the moorland, flying back and forth with the distressed pipit harassing desperately and I realised I was watching a female scouting for somewhere to lay. After hopping up and down the fence posts a few times, she flew down into the hummocky grass, then straight back up to the gate post. The pipit was going mad. After another couple of runs up and down the fence, still chased by the pipit she dived down into the grassland a second time, disappeared for a few seconds, reappeared and flew straight off into the distance across the moor – she was gone.

You could spend years waiting to see a cuckoo lay her egg, even if you knew where to look. This view from my window has been a constant delight in the time I’ve lived here – I’ve sat and watched barn owls hunting low over the fields at dusk, green woodpeckers anting, crossbills silhouetted on the topmost branches of the pines, red kites catching thermals, hen harriers quartering the moorland, gangs of curlew circling the house with their plaintive cries, skylarks filling the air with their fluting song as well as more familiar garden birds on the nut and seed feeders. There has been the occasional deafening clatter of a starling murmuration, hares have been constant neighbours and there was one memorable occasion when a roe deer came close then bounced off across the fields, its white rump bobbing; but nothing, nothing compares to the extraordinary privilege – and sheer chance – of witnessing a female cuckoo in full, single-minded, egg-laying action.