I learned something yesterday! As they say, a day without learning something new is a day wasted!
For 51 years I was under the assumption that cuckoos lived in Switzerland, most likely in the roof of a funny little Swiss mountain house and went "cuckoo! cuckoo!". I was not naive enough to think it would have been on the hour though.
Anyway, yesterday morning myself and the Lovely Leslie were awakened at some ungodly hour by an awful racket outside our bedroom window. It sounded like a bird was in some kind of danger or had been injured. A dreadful squawking going on and on.
Finally, in bad grace and muttering threats of what I would do if I had access to a firearm, I got up and had a look outside. After a while I could make out two large birds, accompanied by a couple of currawongs. Grabbing my binoculars I noticed that one of the large birds was begging for food and the currawong was actually feeding it (see photo above). This went on for a long time, the little squadron of birds going from tree to tree making the dreadful racket. The Lovely Leslie and I were stumped, we'd never seen anything like it!
Intrigued, we hit the laptops and eventually worked out that the large birds were, in fact, Channel-Billed Cuckoos. Would you believe we had the world's largest cuckoo living right here in Ulladulla and in our back yard!
What amazed us the most is the cruel yet clever way this bird has evolved. Mother Cuckoo lays an egg in the nest of its targeted host, usually magpies or currawongs. The poor old currawong or maggie hatches the egg, then spends the majority of its time trying to feed a chick that eventually grows to twice the size of it's "parent". Apparently the other chicks in the nest die because Mum is so busy trying to feed the noisy and much large cuckoo that they go unfed.
So that's what we were witnessing. Our little peek into this strange world is at the twilight of the relationship though. Judging by the size of the cuckoo it is now fully grown. I also read online that these birds migrate to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, starting in February and March.
For 51 years I was under the assumption that cuckoos lived in Switzerland, most likely in the roof of a funny little Swiss mountain house and went "cuckoo! cuckoo!". I was not naive enough to think it would have been on the hour though.
Anyway, yesterday morning myself and the Lovely Leslie were awakened at some ungodly hour by an awful racket outside our bedroom window. It sounded like a bird was in some kind of danger or had been injured. A dreadful squawking going on and on.
Finally, in bad grace and muttering threats of what I would do if I had access to a firearm, I got up and had a look outside. After a while I could make out two large birds, accompanied by a couple of currawongs. Grabbing my binoculars I noticed that one of the large birds was begging for food and the currawong was actually feeding it (see photo above). This went on for a long time, the little squadron of birds going from tree to tree making the dreadful racket. The Lovely Leslie and I were stumped, we'd never seen anything like it!
Intrigued, we hit the laptops and eventually worked out that the large birds were, in fact, Channel-Billed Cuckoos. Would you believe we had the world's largest cuckoo living right here in Ulladulla and in our back yard!
What amazed us the most is the cruel yet clever way this bird has evolved. Mother Cuckoo lays an egg in the nest of its targeted host, usually magpies or currawongs. The poor old currawong or maggie hatches the egg, then spends the majority of its time trying to feed a chick that eventually grows to twice the size of it's "parent". Apparently the other chicks in the nest die because Mum is so busy trying to feed the noisy and much large cuckoo that they go unfed.
So that's what we were witnessing. Our little peek into this strange world is at the twilight of the relationship though. Judging by the size of the cuckoo it is now fully grown. I also read online that these birds migrate to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, starting in February and March.
So, there you go!
One of the reasons we love being where we are is because we get to see these kinds of things. Our life in the suburbs of Canberra was never like this.
One of the reasons we love being where we are is because we get to see these kinds of things. Our life in the suburbs of Canberra was never like this.
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