Migrants onThe Foel

Made an early morning visit to the Foel this am getting there about 5:40am just as it was getting light. As I walked up the track from the road from the Einion I had my first sighting of a male Cuckoo. He flew around a bit before landing on the View Point rocks. Before I could get my scope focused he was ejected by a Wren, aggressive little critters, it, the Cuckoo disappeared down the hill so I focused my attention and scope on a male Whinchat singing from a large Holly tree right beside me. As Nut pushed the sun up his colours became more apparent and all the time he sang. The Cuckoo had started calling so I went to the view point and found him perched on the power lines in-front and below me. I sat there for about 20mins listening and watching and attempting to sketch him, albeit without my reading glasses. Eventually he flew right about 100m into a rowan tree where he was immediately seen off by a pair of Mipits. As I sat and listened there were two more singing Whinchats, singing White-throat and I could hear Tree Pipit, I suppose Tripits?. The Cuckoo eventually returned to a different tree and 2-300m to the left, from where he dispatched by a pair of Yellowhammers, a year tick for me. It wasn't his day as he flew further left and met yet more grief from a pair Tree Pipits, presumably the ones I had heard earlier. Whilst this was happening a second male Cuckoo flew up the Einion Valley and landed in the newly leafed Larches and started to call. I moved to the small curved oak bench back towards the road as by now the sun had reached there and I was a bit chilled and spent another hour just watching all these wonderful migrants setting up home for the summer and ruminated with no particular conclusion about which of these small birds would end up the cuckold. No road noise just the sound of the birds, and sunshine, lovely.