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BBC radio 4

It took no more than a minute of this absorbing documentary (30 June) to apprehend that the cuckoo was going to play a highly figurative role in it. It is a symbol of freedom, the men from the British Trust for Ornithology assured presenter Brett Westwood, and a mark of summer’s onset, not to mention a link between the British Isles (where migrants turn out to spend a bare three months a year) and its African homeland.

There was a lot more about the cuckoo: its resourcefulness; its spectacular rate of knots (one specimen tracked through its journey to the UK managed the 5,500km trip in a week); the odd mixture of hereditary urge and magnetic pull that sets it on its way – 2020 was apparently a typical year for cuckoo migration, with no “beasts from the east” waiting to prompt a rapid return trip home.