Cuckoos arrive to herald the spring
IT is usually a good guide to the changing seasons when the first of the cuckoos is heard as winter draws slowly, too slowly to an end.
So the distinctive, rather melancholy trill of a fan-tailed cuckoo at Ocean Grove recently was a welcome sign of the change.
The fan-tailed is one of seven species of cuckoos that visit our part of Australia each spring.
On occasion one will overwinter here, but they remain quiet so are easily overlooked.
Midway in size between the bronze-cuckoos and the pallid, the fan-tailed is grey with a cinnamon-beige chest.
It has a bright yellow eyering and the tail is strongly “toothed” in white.
Its most distinctive feature is its call — a downward trill that has a distinctively melancholy tone to it.
The cuckoos usually select birds smaller than themselves to raise their young.
The fan-tailed shows a preference for those that build domed nests — fairy-wrens, thornbills and scrub-wrens.
Timing is critical, for the cuckoo’s egg must hatch at the same time as that of the host.
Within a day or two of hatching, the baby cuckoo tosses out any nestlings or eggs of the nest’s owner.
This means all the food the adults bring to the nest is consumed by the cuckoo.
And being a much larger bird than the host, it needs all the food it can get to grow to fledgling size.
In the next few weeks we are likely to hear the first bronze-cuckoos, then later the pallid cuckoos should arrive.
The last will be the koel — its arrival will depend on the fruit on the local Moreton Bay figs ripening.
Once universally disliked, the cuckoos are now accepted as an integral and interesting part of our local bird community. Wildlife information and questions can be sent to ppescott@gmail.com