Forty years ago, the forestry in the Elenydd mountains was a monoculture of young Sitka spruce plantations. Today, it is a patchwork of ‘clearfells’ and different aged plantings. The overgrown clearings are rich in small birds and here, cuckoos are calling in surprisingly good numbers. One catches a drinker moth Euthrix potatoria caterpillar that it then ‘cleaned’, well bashed about on a branch to remove the hairy skin, before swallowing the juicy insides. The caterpillars are easy to spot in the Molinia sward and appear to be quite common. Cuckoos are hairy caterpillar specialists, prey avoided by most other birds; so perhaps the recent spread of Molinia in the uplands has increased the number of drinkers and the hence the number of cuckoos? These and other large moth species are now largely absent from lowland Britain and so are the cuckoos.