We last heard from Victor on April 10 when he had just completed his desert crossing and was near the Algerian oasis town of Mansourah, at the northern edge of the Sahara. Based on the data we have received we can't be sure whether Victor has perished or it is his tag that has failed. The project will benefit greatly from the data contributed by Victor since he was first tagged in 2016 and we are grateful to everyone that sponsored and supported him. 

Victor is pretty much on the northern edge of the Sahara - he has a little way to go but has found the oasis town of Mansourah and its date plantations. In 2017 he arrived back in the UK on 12 May, and on 21 April in 2018, it will be interesting to see when he arrives back this year. He is currently 2,851km (1,771 miles) north and east of his last location in Ghana.

Victor has moved north and east and across the border into Ghana. He is currently in dense forest in the Mpameso Forest Reserve and 18km (11 miles) from the border with Ivory Coast.

Victor has crossed the border into Ivory Coast. He is now one of five satellite tagged Cuckoos in Ivory Coast. He is currently just to the east of the town of Diambarakrou and 179km (111 miles) south and west of his stopover in Ghana.

On 9 March we received a couple of locations that suggested that Victor was in Cameroon and just after 8am on 11 March we received a good quality location that proved this is the case. However, he isn’t in Cameroon, he is in eastern Ghana, close to the border with Ivory Coast. During the last few days he has flown almost 2,000km (1,250 miles). He is in fairly open forest close to the village of Broni. His map will update overnight.

Victor is still in western CAR, moving around the gallery forest he has been in for the last five weeks. It will be interesting to see if he moves before the 9 March this year.

Victor is still settled in the gallery forest that he has been in for almost a month now. In 2017 he began his journey west on 9 March but he didn’t arrive at his current site until 14 February. It could be that we see him move west any day now.

Victor has been settled in eastern Central African Republic for the last three weeks. He is moving around an area of wooded valleys and could make a move west any day now.

During the last couple of days Victor has headed north with a vengeance, completing a flight of 646km (401 miles). He is now in eastern Central African Republic and currently further north than any of our other tagged Cuckoos.

On 28 December we received a series of locations from Victor's tag that showed he is still alive, although the battery charge on his tag is very low. He is still in dense forest in central eastern Gabon. He is currently on the eastern edge of a band of thunderstorms and it is 30 degrees.

We haven't heard from Victor for a couple of weeks but looking at the last batch of data we received the battery level was low on his tag. He is in an area of dense forest and the solar panel on the tag is probably not seeing much sunlight. Fingers crossed it gets enough to send us more data soon.

Victor seems settled in the rainforest in central eastern Gabon. He has moved 19km (12 miles) south within the forest and is now quite close to Robinson, one of our other tagged Cuckoos. It might be that this is his winter site, although in the 2016 he wintered in Angola and in 2017, Gabon. He is currently midway between these two areas.

Since arriving in Gabon on 19 October Victor seems pretty settled. He is still in an area of dense forest close to his arrival point.

During the last couple of weeks, Victor has moved south out of Cameroon and into Gabon. He is currently to the northwest of the Teke plateau and close to three of our other tagged Cuckoos, Bowie, Knepp and Robinson, in an area of very dense forest.

During the last couple of weeks Victor has been making his way east towards the Congo. He is currently in southern Cameroon and around 500km (342 miles) from the northern edge of the Teke plateau.

Victor is still at his stopover site in Burkina Faso. In 2016 he moved east from here on 31 August and in 2017 on 14 August, he could make his move east any day now. His next staging location is close to the Kainji Reservoir in western Nigeria, another 900km (580 miles) to the east of his current location.

It seems Victor might have had an interesting flight over the desert. He started his crossing in a southeasterly direction but about a third of the way into the desert he began heading west and continued on this track all the way to Burkina Faso and the southern edge of the desert. Burkina Faso has been his staging area for the last two years, in 2017 he arrived here on 19 Jul and on 1 August in 2016.

It is interesting to look at the winds during his crossing. For the first part, when he was heading east, he was flying into a light headwind coming from the southeast, roughly at the point he started heading west he met a light headwind coming from the southwest. We know that birds prefer to fly into light headwinds, doing so gives them a greater degree of control over their flight than a tailwind would, but it is great to see this in action. Of course if the headwind is too strong birds will sit it out until conditions improve.

Over the weekend, Victor's tag showed that he was in Algeria and on the northern edge of the Sahara, but around breakfast on 9 July, three poor locations from his tag suggest he has already begun his desert crossing and that he was to the south of the Grand Erg Oriental Desert. This puts him around a third of the way into his desert flight. 

A series of locations received around breakfast on 5 July show that Victor is in Spain, the map will show this when it automatically updates. He has flown 620km (385 miles) in just over two days. He is currently south of Fayon and the Ebro River.

Victor is in France, having arrived late evening on 17 June. He is using the same area of woodland close to Chateauroux, that Lambert used on his way south.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, we received a location from Victor's tag that told us he had successfully made it back to his breeding site in King's Forest, Suffolk. Since his arrival he doesn't look to have been doing much resting, he has been ranging quite widely in the forest and the surrounding area. Presumably he is keen to find a female or two.

On 11 April, Victor was embarking on his desert crossing, and midway through Algeria and the tough crossing. By 13 April he had not only completed this, but an ocean crossing aswell, to reach the island of Sardinia, 1985km (1230 miles) from his previous location in Algeria. From Sardinia, he continued on another 610km (380 miles) to France, where a location placed him 60km (40 miles) southwest of Lyon.  He is the third of our Cuckoos to return to Europe. 

The latest signals, received yesterday, show that Victor is also on his way home and was mid-way through his desert crossing. The location yesterday afternoon placed him in Algeria, 1950km (1210 miles) from his last location in Ivory Coast. A further poor quality signal indicates he continued on a further 235km (145 miles) so we will have to wait for further signals to see where he is and whether he has completed his desert crossing. He is the third of our tagged Cuckoos to cross the desert this year and is ahead of last year's schedule, where he had completed his desert crossing by 23 April and was back in the UK by 6 May.   

During the evening of 2 April we received a couple of locatrions that showed Victor has begun to move west and has crossed the border in to Ivory Coast. It will be interesting to see where he is when we next hear from him. Will he haved moved further west or begun his desert crossing?

Victor has made a big movement westwards and is now in Ghana, West Africa. By 8 March he had covered 1790km (1100 miles) from his previous location in Central African Republic, from where his tag last transmitted on 3 March, and was west of Lake Volta. He's a little bit ahead of where he was at this time last year, when he moved to Ghana in early April and had crossed the desert to northern Africa by 23 April. Will he spend longer preparing for his crossing or take on the challenge earlier than in 2017?

Victor's newest signals on 14 February show he's moved a further 400km (245 miles) northwards and is now in the west of the Central African Republic. 

Since 27 November Victor has journeyed 265km (170 miles) south within Gabon by the early hours of the 29 November.  He is now just south-east of Bongoville. 

From northern Gabon, Victor has moved to eastern Gabon, travelling 270km (170 miles). He is now close to Mbay and the Mwagne National Park. Last year at this time he was in Cameroon where he remained until 26 October. He then went on to Angola, where we saw him spend last winter. 

By the late afternoon of 26 August Victor had traveled 360km (225 miles) to southern Nigeria. He continued moving eastwards through until the early evening when his tag transmitted from the Lower Niger Forest, close to the River Niger. The next transmission two days later was from the Cameroon/Gabon border, from within the Congo Rainforest Basin, some 740km (460 miles) to the south east. Victor had made it to the rainforest!  

Victor is still in Nigeria but has moved 170km (100 miles) south west to the Old Oyo National Park.

By the 11 August Victor had moved 345km (214 miles) southeast to northern Ghana before continuing on a further 630km (390 miles) east to Nigeria over the next couple of days. The last signals show him to the south east of the Kainji Lake, a reservoir on the Niger River, formed by the Kainji Dam. 

Victor is in Burkina Faso. Having only stayed for only a couple of days in Algeria before continuing south, Victor traveled 2190km (1360 miles), reaching south eastern Mauritania during the evening of 18 July, and continuing to fly east to Mali during the early hours of the 19 July. By the 23 he had moved east again to Burkina Faso adding on another 605 km (375 miles). 

A series of locations received from Victor's tag on the evening of 16 July showed that he had left central Spain and was in North Africa, in northwest Algeria, on the northern edge of the Sahara.

Victor has moved a little further south and is now in the La Brenne Regional Nature Park, east of Poitiers. He stopped here in May on his way back to the UK and presumably found it a good enough spot to revisit!

Locations received from Victor's tag during the late afternoon on 4 June showed that he had left the UK and was in central France. Last spring he left the UK around 25 June, stopping briefly in northeastern France before moving to Central France. He is currently in an area of forest just south of Orleans and around 100km (65 miles) north of the area close to Chateauroux where he spent 10 days last spring.

Victor is still ranging quite widely around King's Forest in Suffolk but also occasionally visiting Thetford Forest over the border in Norfolk. Like PJ he has also been in the vicinity of the BTO's Nunnery Lakes. The most recent locations received around lunch on 23 May showed that he was to the east of Thetford on the edge of heathland close to Roudham.

By 3 May, Victor was in northern France, close to Rouen. Just a couple of days later and a further 350 km (220 miles) and he was back in the UK, at his breeding grounds on the Norfolk/Suffolk border by 5 May. He is the fourth of our tagged Cuckoos to arrive this spring. 

Victor has flown a further 290km (180 miles) north within France and is now in the La Brenne Regional Nature Park, east of Poitiers. The park covers 166,000 hectares and is dotted with over 2,000 lakes and ponds. Hopefully this is a good area for him to feed and rest in but we might expect him to continue his journey any time soon. 

Victor had been in Ghana since 11 April but transmissions on the 22nd April showed that he was in the Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria. He had completed his desert crossing having travelled over 3113 km (1935 miles).  We received a further series of signals throughout the evening which showed he didn't stop but continued onwards. We were able to follow him mid-way over his crossing of the Channel before the tag turned off. When the tag next sent signals it was around 48 hours later and Victor was a further 1000km north of his previous location in Algeria and was just 50km south west of Marmande in France! He is the fourth of our tagged Cuckoos to cross the desert and is curently further north than Larry, who crossed the desert a few days earlier. 

Victor has continued heading west and has left Nigeria. He has travelled 495km (307 miles) to reach a location in Ghana, just west of the Digya National Park. 

From his last location in Cameroon, Victor has travelled around 995 km (620 miles) to reach a new location in southwest of Nigeria. He is now just north of Lagos, Nigeria's largest City. 

Victor has begun to head west, flying 318km (198 miles) in the last two days. He is currently in central Cameroon on the banks of the Sanaga River.

Having travelled north through Gabon and into Cameroon, Victor has turned east and is currently in Central African Republic. He is the most easterly tagged Cuckoo except for David, whose last tag transmissions were sent from his wintering location in Democratic Republic of Congo. There is 2,619km (1,627 miles) between Victor and our most westerly Cuckoo, Selborne. At some stage in the next week or so we would expect Victor to begin heading west.

Over the course of a few days Victor has headed north, covering a total distance of 950km (590 miles), and arriving in northern Gabon by 3 January. Could this be the start of his return home?

It's more than likely that this is the first northward 'phase' of his annual journey but doesn't necessarily mean he'll continue. He will probably now stay in that region for a couple of weeks before moving north of the forest zone and then moving into West Africa. As he was one of the birds that went so far south this year, he may simply have started early to return to the area that would be a typical mid-winter location for our cuckoos most years.

Signals received from Victor's tag today show that he has left the area he was in, close to PJ, and headed 130km (81 miles) north within Angola. He is now less than 5 miles from both Larry and Bill!  

Cuckoo 161324 has received a name, Victor! He has been kindly named by Mrs Ann Masters in memory of her husband Vic. Good luck on your return journey Victor.  

161324 has moved on from his last location, but not too far. By the 28 he had travelled just 125km (75 miles) in a northwest direction and there he remained for a few days. Recent transmissions on 8 November show that 161324 has made a further small movement of 40km (25 miles) south.

Having spent almost a month in Cameroon, 161324 has moved south, a long way south. Locations received from his tag on 26 October showed that he was in northern Angola just to the south of Cumbo and 1,143km (710 miles) south of his location in Cameroon. He may well spend the winter here.

Locations received from the tag of 161324 on 23 September showed that he was heading south through Burkina Faso. His tag then powered down to allow the small solar panel to recharge the batteries. When it powered back up again 161324 had turned east and was in Nigeria, roughly midway between the Dagida Game Reserve and Old Oyo National Park. He didn't hang around though and a couple of days later he was 676km (420 miles) to the south and east of his last location but still in Nigeria. He didn't stay here long either, in the early hours of 30 September he was another 481km (300 miles) to the south in Cameroon 60km (40 miles) east of the capital Yaounde, and on the northern edge of the tropical rainforest. A few poor quality locations received on 2 October suggest he is still at this location.

Since heading back north into Mali 161324 has stayed in the river valley he found. His tag is still sending lots of information and he appears to be alive and well.

Having spent around three weeks in Burkina Faso, 161324 has made a very unusual movement. Instead of heading east and south, he has moved north and east, with the emphasis on north. He is currently on the southern edge of the Sahara in a river valley in southeast Mali. On 31 August he was 300km (184 miles) east of his current location, so it seems that he has doubled back, probably because he struggled to find food at the new site. It will be interesting to see how long he stays here, or to see if he eventually heads back to the stopover site in Burkina Faso he left on 29 August.  We have seen other Cuckoos head back to the last site they knew had good feeding.

Since arriving in Burkina Faso 161324 has been settled in the area northeast of Ouagadougou. He appears to be using an area of cultivation around a number of small settlements.The nearest town is Kyentenga, 3.8km (2.3 miles) to the southwest.

Since successfully crossing the Sahara and arriving safely in Mali, 161324 has moved south and east into Burkina Faso and is currently 82km (51 miles) north and east of the capital Ouagadougou.

On 22nd July 161324 left Spain and flew 300 miles south into northern Algeria. He only stopped there for a few hours before pushing on south, flying 1,500 miles to cross the Sahara and arrive at his current location in Mali.

During the early hours of 10 July we received a location from Cuckoo 161324's tag that showed he had left France, flown over the Pyrenees and carried south to central Spain. He is currently around 130km (80 miles) west of Castellon de la Plana.

Since arriving in France on 25 June, Cuckoo 161324 has slowly made his way south and is currently in western central France close to Limoges, where it is a sunny 27 degrees C, although if he hangs around it is forecast to be wet and cool during the middle part of next week.

Cuckoo 161324 joined the 2016 Cuckoos on 10 June when his tag was deployed in King's Forest, Suffolk, close to North Stow. He remained in the area, heading north into Thetford Forest and even visiting the BTO's Nunnery Lakes nature reserve until 25 June, when a location recieved from his tag told us that he had crossed the English Channel and was in northeast France, just south of Calais.