PALLID CUCKOO

 

Palli Cuckoo Cuculus pallidus

 

 

 

 

Cuckoos have been very vocal in these

early days of Spring . 

Along the timbered tracks under Mount William, the cuckoos let the world know they are about, with their loud and constant calling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a female Pallid Cuckoo,  seen scurrying around under the roadside trees as it searched for food, in this case a caterpillar.

The colouring of the female with her white chest and beautifully mottled tail and wings makes her very easy to distinguish from the male with her more sombre grey colours. He too has the brightly black and white flecked tail and the brilliant yellow eye ring of the female.  

 

 

 

The birds are quite easy to locate in the breeding times. They will call repeatedly, often perched in the open, on a tree branch, a fence wire, a post  or in the case of the Fan Tailed Cuckoo in the last entry, on a clothes line wire.

  

 Like all cuckoos, the females will lay their eggs into the nests of other birds, after first ejecting the eggs or the young of the now to be host-parents. Often the host parents are smaller species than the cuckoos, robins, swallows and various honeyeaters. I have seen a poor Fairy Wren struggling to feed a young cuckoo, already twice the size of the step parent.