For the past week or so my my husband and I plus the neighbours have been hearing and talking about a new bird which we have not been able to identify until now! At first we thought it was a baby crow as it seemed to be with the crows but it looked nothing like a crow!

This bird is one extremely large and noisy critter, hence the interest from the neighbours.  He has been with or following the resident crows and has been perched on the tallest tree in a neighbour’s yard, too far for us to get a close look at him to be able to properly identify him until today when he was perched a bit closer to us.  After some research we found out that he is a juvenile Channel-billed Cuckoo.

Merlo helped me with my research

As I have not been able to get close enough to him yet, I borrowed these photographs from the Internet

Juvenile Channel-billed Cuckoo taken by Anthony Katon

Adult Channel-billed Cuckoo taken by Paul Walbridge

This large bird is 65cm in length and is sometimes referred to a a Stormbird. It is the world’s largest cuckoo who migrates to north eastern Australia from New Guinea and Indonesia each spring.

It has a massive, dirty pink coloured beak and long tail with a distinctive, almost hawk-like cruciform flight silhouette.  The juvenile we are seeing has pale tips to the feathers and wings and the rest of his plumage is buff.  Mature birds have red skin around the eye and are more grey in colour.

Photo by Bill Oakley where you can see the red skin around its eye when it matures.

They eat insects and fruit, particularly figs and sometimes the nestlings and eggs of other birds.

What’s interesting about this bird which explains why he is with the crows is that Channel-billed cuckoos are brood parastites – instead of raising their own young, they lay eggs in the nests of other birds which become their hosts – particularly crows, currawongs, butcherbirds and Australian magpies.

The Channel-billed Cuckoo do not eject their host eggs upon hatching or kill the host chicks, fortunately, but sadly seldom survive due to the cuckoo monopolising the supply of food and they soon very quickly outsize their smaller host parents.

With a host parent, pied currawong.  Photo by Duncan Coles

I forgot to mention that they are extremely noisy and this juvenile has been announcing his presence to us and the nearby neighbours with his continuous and harsh ork, ork,ork.

My aim is to try and get some good photographs of him but this will prove to be tricky.

Info and Photo Sources:

http://www.wiresnr.org/channelbilledcuckoo.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel-billed_Cuckoo

http://www.aviceda.org/abid/search.php?keyword=Channel-billed+Cuckoo