September should find me back in Egypt after a brief sojourn in the UK returning via Warsaw. Traveling from the now infamous Heathrow airport, and the widely ridiculed joke known as Terminal Five, whether my luggage will join me on Egyptian soil is rather more open to question.

Poland, however, I am looking forward to, not least because my travel guides tell me that the bulky, stick nests of the White Stork are “a much loved part of the rural scene.” Those same storks will be following me south this month as they head through Egyptian airspace south to sub-Saharan African wintering grounds. Watching a flock of thousands of these impressive birds catching the thermals over the Sinai or Red Sea mountains is one of Egypt’s great ornithological spectacles.

White Storks are superficially similar to the herons and egrets, tall, long-legged, long-necked birds, all white save for the tips and trailing edge to the wings. The legs and bill are scarlet. In flight they can be readily told from the egrets as storks fly with the neck outstretched, egrets with it tucked up and retracted. At a distance a flock of White Storks may be confused with Common Cranes, but cranes fly in neatly regimented Vs and lines, storks in rather more chaotic gaggles. Flocks of White Storks at key migration bottlenecks such as Gebel Zeit just north of Hurghada can number tens of thousands.

While the White Stork is a common migrant, Egypt lying on one of its major migration corridors, a close relative, the Black Stork is a rather rarer and less gregarious visitor. The Black Stork is aptly named, largely glossy black with a white belly but sharing the red bill and legs of its white cousin.

One of the special pleasures of being a naturalist in Egypt is to be able to look at the millennia of representations in tomb paintings, and hieroglyphs, often astonishingly accurate, of the country’s fauna. One might expect a bird as large, distinctive and numerous as the White Stork to appear prominently in these friezes but curiously I know of not a single representation of the species from Ancient Egypt and no mummified remains. Patrick Houlihan in his illuminating The Birds of Ancient Egypt makes no mention of the species but does track down a single depiction of the much rarer Black Stork. This is a solitary portrait, heavily denuded but still identifiable (though Abdim’s Stork should not be discounted), from the tomb of Baket III at Beni Hassan.

What is also interesting from Houlihan’s book are two species of stork represented in the art of the Ancients that are unknown in modern Egypt. The first is the Saddle-billed Stork, a stonking great bird almost the height of a man and with a wingspan of almost three meters. The body is largely white with black neck and wings, but the most distinctive feature is the vast bill, all red with a black band and a yellow shield at the base. The sexes are alike though the male has dark eyes, and the female’s are pale. Saddle-billed Storks have never been recorded in modern Egypt but are represented in Ancient Egyptian art and as a hieroglyph. The most famous depiction is on an ivory knife handle dating from the Late Predynastic era. Eight Saddle-billed Storks are carved accompanying lions, giraffes and elephants, tellingly all savannah species from sub-Saharan Africa.

The other stork from pharaonic times is Abdim’s Stork, a smaller species not unlike the Black Stork but with more white on the belly and a greenish rather than red bill. There are no known depictions of Abdim’s Stork from the ancient friezes but it has been recorded as mummified remains. Today it too is a savannah species widely distributed over its African range and just extending onto the Arabian peninsular.

So what might this tell us? Two savannah species unknown in modern Egypt are documented in the pharaonic records and there are virtually no representations of our current storks, not even one of the White Storks that pass through here twice a year in their hundreds of thousands. The answer probably lies in climate change, not the current human manufactured phenomenon but a natural warming and drying of the climate around six to eight thousand years ago that turned the Western Desert into desert and forced the savannah species south. As the climate warmed perhaps the White Storks modified their migration routes adopting corridors where they had previously been absent.

A further African stork is claimed by Houlihan on the basis of a possible single representation in the Tomb of Ti. I say stork but the Whale-headed Stork is one of those avian conundrums that puzzles taxonomists that try to classify it. It has been lumped in with the herons, placed with the storks and, as is currently the case, put in a family of its own. It does indeed look like a stork albeit a uniform blue-gray one; however its defining characteristic is its vast shovel of a bill, quite unlike the pointed beak of a stork, that gives it its alternative name of Shoebill. Unrecorded in modern Egypt, the supposed depiction in Ti does have a bloated bill but lacks other characteristics such as the short crest on the back of the head that gives the bird a somewhat angular profile. However as the Shoebill is almost entirely confined to papyrus swamps it would not be unexpected in ancient Egypt.

Other African bird species cling on, and few are more distinctive than the Senegal Coucal. The Senegal Coucal is a relative of the cuckoos though unlike its notoriously parasitic relatives it builds its own nest and rears its own young. Widely distributed in the Nile Delta and more erratically south along the Valley to Aswan, the Senegal Coucal is more often heard than seen. Its sonorous, rather deep and descending huu huu huu huu is one of the distinctive sounds of the agricultural areas, sounding not unlike air being blown over an empty bottleneck — indeed one of its African relatives, Burchell’s Coucal, is known in South Africa as the Bottlebird.

It is far more difficult to catch a glimpse of the Senegal Coucal. It is something of a skulker sticking to patches of dense vegetation but once sighted it is unmistakable. It is 40 centimeters long with a long graduated dark tail, a black cap, creamy white under parts and bright chestnut above. Perhaps most often seen flying from one patch of cover to another, its flight is lazy, almost clumsy. It doesn’t so much land as crash.

The coucal’s more famous relative, the Common Cuckoo will be passing through Egypt this month, though it is not particularly common. The male Common Cuckoo is dark grey above, barred black and white below. It looks not unlike a Sparrowhawk but is readily distinguished by its pointed wings and slender bill. The female comes in two color phases, one similar to the male though tinged brown, the other barred black and rufous throughout.

For me, the Common Cuckoo is the most remarkable of all the migratory species passing through Egypt this fall. Bird migration is an incredible phenomenon and much of the details of just how the birds navigate over thousands of kilometers of unfamiliar territory remains a mystery, but that mystery deepens with the Common Cuckoo. Cuckoos are brood-parasites; that is, the female lays her eggs in the nest of another species, most commonly Meadow Pipits or Reed Warblers, though many other host species have been recorded. With that, her parental work done: Incubating the egg and rearing the alien chick is left entirely to the host parents.

Fast forward a few weeks and the newly fledged cuckoo will be getting restless. The adult birds will already have left and the young bird will embark on its first migration guided entirely by instinct. And what a migration that may be. Common Cuckoos breed as far north as arctic Norway and winter as far south as southern South Africa. As they pass through Egypt these youngsters look much like heavily barred adults but can readily be distinguished by a distinct white patch on the nape. If you see one, wish it well on its mind-boggling journey. et