https://aeon.co/essays/british-place-names-resonate-with-the-song-of-missing-birds
Cuckoos, like so many British birds that are threatened or extinct, would have been much more abundant in the Middle Ages. Yaxley, on the edge of surviving cuckoo strongholds in the former Fens, would have thronged to their calls. Now these places, and many like them where the birds of their names are absent, are solemnly displaced, the names creaking in the wind like dilapidated pub signs whose buildings have long since closed or fallen into ruin. We can sense that displacement in the sprawl of modern suburban environments too, which, with considerable irony, fashionably assign bird nomenclatures to roads and residential spaces (Sandpiper Drive, Nightingale Way, Lark Rise, Goldcrest Mews…) where the species named are nowhere to be seen, and perhaps never have been.
