Daybreak in south-east Queensland. I’m up early, earlier than the stifling summer season warmth settles in and the thunderstorms brew up over the hinterland. I stroll my regular route by way of the neighborhood, maintaining a psychological listing of birds as I’m going: the tu-heer of a figbird, the brief pee-pee-pee chime of a pale-headed rosella, an explosion of rainbow lorikeets, and the mournful cry of a Pacific koel perched excessive in a purple-blooming jacaranda.
Thirty minutes and 30 birds in, I flip again for residence. A name begins within the distance, rising louder because the chicken flies in my course. That is no melodious birdsong. It’s a raucous, undulating shriek delivered at full quantity, echoing throughout the panorama and thru my cranium.
The din grows louder and louder till three shadows streak overhead. With their crucifix form, huge curved payments, and blood-red crimson eyes, they appear to be a miniature hornbill or a colorless, demented toucan. However these winged wonders are channel-billed cuckoos, the world’s largest brood parasite and maybe my favourite summer season migrant to jap Australia.
Introducing Scythrops novaehollandiae
My first encounter with a channel-billed cuckoo is seared into my reminiscence: I used to be driving alongside a again highway when a ginormous chicken flew low in entrance of the automobile, narrowly lacking the windshield and touchdown in a fruiting tree to my left. Hopeless twitcher that I’m, I slammed on the brakes and hopped out. Within the tree above me, scarfing down grape-sized yellow figs, was one thing that seemed prefer it flew straight out of a Jurassic World CGI brainstorming assembly.
What the heck is THAT?
5 extra birds clambered by way of the fig tree, devouring fruit and making a normal ruckus. I didn’t have a subject information available, so I typed “actually massive chicken with crimson eye” into Google. It didn’t take lengthy for me to ID them as channel-billed cuckoos, as a result of nothing else in Australia appears to be like even remotely like this chicken.
They’re the scale of a raptor, with broad wings, an extended, trailing tail, and a honking nice invoice harking back to hornbills or toucanets. Their plumage is a lightweight gray, with thick black and white banding on the tail feathers. And their eyes: massive, beady, blood-red, surrounded by a strawberry-colored ring of naked pores and skin.
Early European observers famous the chicken’s similarity to different non-cuckoo species, describing them as “’psittaceous [parrot-like] hornbills.” It’s an apt description, given the chicken’s dimension, which may be as much as 28 inches lengthy, with a wingspan of as much as 3.5 ft.
For Australians, the arrival of channel-billed cuckoos heralds the start of summer season. The birds arrive in northern and jap Australia someday between September and November, migrating from their wintering grounds in jap Indonesia and New Guinea.
As soon as the channel-bills arrive they’ve two goals: feast on bugs, figs, and different fruiting bushes; and cross on their genetic materials with as little effort as doable.
Brood Parasites and Beleaguered Babysitters
Cuckoos — together with the channel-billed cuckoo — are brood parasites, which is only a fancy means of claiming that they’re lazy dad and mom. (Or strategic, relying on how you are feeling about children.) Brood parasites lay their eggs within the nests of different species, letting the opposite birds do all of the exhausting work of incubating, feeding, and fledgling their chicks.
It’s a helpful evolutionary technique. All of the cuckoos must do is mate and produce the egg. They keep away from the vitality expenditure and dangers that include constructing a nest, defending themselves and their younger from predators, and feeding hungry mouths. Brood parasitism additionally advanced in different chicken teams apart from cuckoos, together with cowbirds, honeyguides, and one species of duck.
Channel-billed cuckoos are each the most important cuckoo and the most important brood parasite on this planet. When it comes time to breed, male channel-billed cuckoos woo females with items of fruit and bugs, and the pairs bond additional by calling to at least one one other. (And by calling I imply raucous shrieking in any respect hours of the day.)
When the feminine is able to lay her eggs, the pair find an appropriate host. Channel-billed cuckoos want the nests of huge, omnivorous chicken species, together with pied currawongs, Australian magpies, and Torresian crows.
The cuckoo pair works collectively to drag off the heist. Male channel-bills will lurk across the host’s nest, upsetting the birds into leaving the nest to mob the cuckoo. Whereas they’re distracted, the feminine cuckoo sneaks in and lays her egg.
Currawongs are such a standard host that the channel-billed cuckoos has advanced eggs that mimic the scale and sample of currawong eggs, making it tougher for the host birds to detect that one thing’s amiss.
Not like different cuckoo species, the feminine channel-bills don’t all the time destroy any eggs already within the nest, and neither do the newly hatched chicks. Even so, the host-species chicks are unlikely to outlive, as the large cuckoo child will monopolize any meals delivered to the nest. Watching younger cuckoos feed is a comical expertise, because the chicks are sometimes twice as massive as their adoptive dad and mom.
Birds of Summer time
The cuckoos proceed to swirl overhead as I stroll residence, their cries ricocheting by way of the neighborhood. Different summer season migrants chime in, hidden unseen within the bushes round me: the buzzy trills of widespread cicadabirds, and the plaintive kooo-el kooo-el of the koel. A metallic blue dollarbird perches on the facility line above me, it’s orange invoice glowing within the daylight.
Australians mark the arrival of summer season in some ways. It means begin of the stifling warmth, and lazy afternoons within the pool or on the seaside. There are recent mangoes and lychees, passionfruit and peaches. The race to mow the grass in between thunderstorms. (Or, in darker years, anxious hours looking forward to bush-fire warnings.) Barbecues with mates, with the monotonous drone of cricket within the background.
However for me, summer season is the time of the channel-bills. The time of loud and raucous cuckoos winging overhead, after I’m fortunate sufficient to see one of many world’s most marvellous birds on my morning stroll.
