A cuckoo feeds a juvenile
Channel-billed cuckoo feeding on figs: photo Geonature
by WTA member Ian Black of Geonature
I arrived at Hinterland Park on the Gold Coast early in the morning and could hear the Channel Billed Cuckoo’s as I pulled up into the carpark. Heading straight for the large fruiting fig tree, I found them feeding as was to be expected (right), but they took off to a big old gum tree a hundred meters away on the highest part of the ridge when they noticed me.
I followed the walking trail around to below the gum tree where one of the cuckoos was making a large ruckus and i was trying to take a few photos of the Cuckoo high in the tree when the other cuckoo returned and with great commotion fed the first bird a fig (below). This continued as i watched the adult return and with those large bills, awkwardly feed the one in the gum tree while it screamed for more.
As the Channel Billed Cuckoo is Australia’s largest brood parasite and does not raise its own young I was surprised to watch what seemed to be an adult doing just that.
See the photo of the cuckoo feeding the youngster also here on Skydrive
Channel-billed cuckoo adult feeding juvenile cuckoo: photo Geonature
Found this bird in a gum tree, I had never seen the channel-billed cuckoo in our area Leslie Dam near Warwick Qld before.We saw a Kurrawong feeding it sure was something different to watch. We have actually seem a second one now, not sure if it was the parent or another juvenile cuckoo. Just wondering if they were common in the area?
They visit southeast Queensland every summer, usually arriving in late September and leaving around March. They have a very distinctive raucous call, and are fairly often seen flying across the sky pursued by crows (a common host). When feeding and resting they are generally not easy to detect, as they tend to stay in the same feeding tree much longer than most other birds, just quietly resting amongst the foliage (often in a fig tree or something else with dense foliage) in between feeding bouts. Hence they may have been there other times without being seen. They’re pretty common in summer on the eastern side of the Main Range – not sure about Warwick.