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The cuckoos are coming!

September 3, 2008
The cuckoos are coming!

Shining Cuckoo c. DOC

With the arrival of a few warm days, the daffodils and the beginning of the breeding season of our passerines, it is only a matter of days till the first Shining Cuckoos arrive.

There is so much we don’t know about cuckoos! We know they spend the non-breeding season in the Pacific Islands but we don’t know if, on their return, they all fly into Northland and slowly move down the country or if they fly directly to wherever they spend the summer throughout the country.

Work in the UK and US has given them a good idea of the migratory patterns of their cuckoos but we simply don’t know about ours. The advent of real-time web reporting such as eBird allows us for the first time to get a handle on how cuckoos migrate from the Pacific Islands to NZ. So why not help!

The distinctive calls of the Shining cuckoo (click here) announces the arrival of spring.

 

Equally distinctive is the call of our other cuckoo the Long-tailed Cuckoo. Its call is a repeated loud harsh hissing followed by a long drawn out shriek which can be rendered as “zzwheesht” with a rising inflection. Long-tailed Cuckoo is a bird of the forest and is rarely seen in suburbia.

 

Why not enter your first sightings of cuckoos (or the first time you hear one) this year into OSNZ's eBird recording system.

 

We will provide an up to the minute summary of sightings (here on the eBird Home page) and maybe even a prize for the best effort or most unusual sighting.

 

It would be great to know how are our cuckoos are faring. Some have suggested that as forest on the Pacific Islands declines and (in the case of the long-tailed cuckoo) some of their preferred host species decline, cuckoos will also decline. The lastest OSNZ Atlas suggest that both species may have declined in range but we need better data. I encourage all to record all their cuckoo observations this year.