The cuckoo

The cuckoo’s reproduction tactics are notorious. The female craftily lays eggs in other birds’ nests. Although this cuckoo egg is usually larger than their own eggs, the nest owners remain oblivious to this: this beautiful big egg seems to make them glad! In this fashion a female cuckoo parasites as many as fifteen nests a year.

The nest owners hatch the "false" egg and feed the young cuckoo. This glutton doesn’t leave enough food for the other peepers and eventually has the nest all for itself. As soon as it is grown up, the young cuckoo leaves for eastern Africa. In spring it’s back and ready to parasite other birds’ nests.

How can you identify a cuckoo?

The cuckoo has a white underside with grey barring. Its head is grey and its back greyish brown. Its feet, bill and eyes are yellow. With its pointed wings, it looks rather like a sparrowhawk, but this last one has broader wings. A cuckoo is much easier heard than seen! Its name derives from its characteristic call: cuckoo! Its name sounds "koekoek" in Dutch, "coucou" in French, "Kuckuck" in German, "kukushka" in Russian and "kak-ko" in Japanese.

Cuckoos eat mainly insect larvae, but also worms, spiders and centipedes. They also like beetles, flies, butterflies and moths, many of them being harmful to agriculture (such as the maybug and the large white butterfly). And moreover, they fancy the hairy poisonous caterpillars despised by other birds.