ON THE WING
The far-carrying, trilling call of a fan-tailed cuckoo rang out across the Waterworks Valley. It’s a constant refrain in summer, but this was at the start of winter.
Was it a fan-tail making an ultra-late departure for its wintering grounds on the mainland or one deciding to take its chances and brave the Tasmanian winter.
Certainly, a cold snap earlier in May had given the cuckoo every incentive to leave.
It’s not the first time I have heard a fan-tailed cuckoo in winter, and the fan-tails were the first of the migrants to arrive in my home valley before last spring, beating the striated pardalote by a few days.
The fan-tail is one of four of Australia’s 17 species of cuckoo to visit Tasmania – along with the pallid, shining and Horsfield’s bronze-cuckoos. The fan-tail appears to be the most common, certainly in my valley, and I must confess I feel relief when it stops singing along with others about February, at the end of the breeding season.
I’m not a fan of cuckoos, especially the fan-tail, which because of its intermediate size is able to exploit a whole range of nests; from the dome, forest-floor constructions of the fairy-wrens to the open, tiny cup nests of the pink robins hidden in dogwood.
Every time I hear their calls and songs I know the cuckoos’ anti-social work is at play. They outsource parenting, of course, laying a single egg in the nests of other birds.
The cuckoo chick grows rapidly, using its large yellow-gaped beak to demand an uneven delivery of food normally shared through a brood. Then the cuckoo chick manoeuvres its body to eject its “siblings” from the nest, or merely suffocates them.
The most disheartening sight is seeing the harried parents feeding the outsized chick. Last summer, I saw a pair of black-headed honeyeaters flying to and fro to a belligerent pallid cuckoo chick, the honeyeaters being only about a third of the cuckoo’s size.
By coincidence, a day after hearing the calling cuckoo I read an account in a British newspaper expressing joy at the arrival of the first cuckoo of spring. The European winter cannot really be considered over until the onomatopoeic call of the European cuckoo – the only species to visit Britain – is heard, and for more than a century readers of London’s The Times have announced it on the newspaper’s letters page.
The cuckoo, however, has carried a more sombre message in recent years. Cuckoos are increasingly failing to arrive from their wintering grounds in Africa, with the clearing of native woodland and drought thought to be the reason.
So when the cuckoo calls, Britons can be forgiven for putting its antisocial behaviour at the back of their minds.