It’s quite likely that sometime over summer you’ve heard an incredibly loud squawking overhead and wondered, what on earth is that bird? Looking up, you’ll see a large, fast-flying bird being hotly pursued by a couple of smaller birds. The bird making the amazing din is the Channel-billed Cuckoo, the largest cuckoo in the world, and the birds in pursuit are probably magpies or currawongs desperately trying to drive it away from their nest.
Each spring, Channel-billed Cuckoos migrate from New Guinea and Indonesia to our shores to breed. The males make an unbelievably loud call to attract the female birds. The male cuckoo then provokes the host birds into leaving the nest, while the female sneaks in to lay her egg in the nest of a magpie or currawong.
The cuckoo chick is a nest parasite that hatches before the host bird’s young. The chick then grows quickly and demands all the food from the host parents, which can starve the host’s young.
The Surprising Benefit of the Channel-billed Cuckoo
While this seems very unfair to the hosts, there is a bright side to this behaviour. The cuckoos often lay their eggs in the nest of the Pied Currawong, a major predator of smaller, rarer native birds such as fairy wrens and silvereyes. One study showed that a pair of nesting currawongs destroyed about forty broods of smaller birds to raise one brood of its own. It may be that by having cuckoos around, some of the damage that currawongs are wreaking on our smaller birds will be lessened.
Channel-billed Cuckoos feed on native figs, which explains why the 4017 area is a popular locality for them. The large variety and number of figs growing on our footpaths and in our parks provide food and habitat for these remarkable birds.
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