Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike chick

To end the Avithera posts for 2021 I will go back to the start of the year to some photos I took of a very young Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike just out of the nest. 

The incessant call of the young bird in our garden attracted my attention. It did not take long to find the chick. I suspect it may have left the nest prematurely. It could barely fly and as it fluttered from one perch to another, landing clumsily each time, it made its way through our garden to the old abandoned orchard where its parents fed the hungry chick for a few days before I lost track of it.

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The young bird’s first set of feathers were beautiful, ranging from soft pale greys to black.

One of the parents arrived with a juicy green caterpillar. It was wary of me and approached the chick using a tangle of branches as cover.

The chick was not bothered by me, it just wanted to be fed.

The parent soon overcame its concern for me and delivered the caterpillar.

The parent was soon back with another caterpillar, a brown one this time.

I kept an eye on the chick from a distance as it moved about the orchard, its calls to be fed showing me where it was located. After a few days it stopped calling – I assume it had grown strong enough to move on. I did not see any other young birds. It is possible the chick’s siblings – BfCs’s usually have 2-3 young - remained in the nest under the care of the their parents and the young bird in our orchard left the nest prematurely by accident. 

Pallid Cuckoo chick

Pallid Cuckoos parasitise birds with open cup shaped nests including Willie Wagtails, woodswallows, whistlers, robins, orioles, cuckoo-shrikes and honeyeaters. The incubation period for the cuckoo egg is 12-14 days which is shorter than the host species incubation period. The larger and stronger cuckoo chick ejects the host’s eggs or young from the nest.

Back in late November, at the popular Hall Road birding site in State Forest on the edge of farmland near Wairewa in East Gippsland, I became aware of a Pallid Cuckoo chick by its incessant calling to be fed by its foster parents, a pair of White-napped Honeyeaters. While the chick was still quite young and small it was larger than the host parents and by the time they finished raising the chick it would dwarf them.

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The bird world has evolved many reproduction solutions with cuckoos that use other bird species to raise their young being one of the more amazing evolutionary developments.

Pheasant Coucal

The Pheasant Coucal (Centropus phasianinus) is a rather large ground-dwelling member of the cuckoo family, however unlike all other cuckoo species in Australia it is not a brood parasite. It builds its own nest and raises its own young with the male doing most of the incubation and feeding of the young. 

Males and females look similar although the female is larger than the male.  They form lasting pairs. During the breeding season their head, neck and entire underparts are black. In the non-breeding period the head, neck and underparts are cinnamon streaked, rufous and buff.

Pheasant Coucals are not found in Victoria. The nearest records in Birdata are around Jervis Bay on the mid NSW south coast. Being sedentary ground dwellers that are not strong fliers, it is perhaps unlikely that we will ever see them in Victoria.  However with climate change and the southerly drift of a number of other vagrant species one cannot rule out the possibility of one turning up in East Gippsland.

Pheasant Coucals inhabit tall grass and other dense ground cover including cultivated sugar cane crops where their presence if often detected by their distinctive call – if you have not heard the call before it is worth checking. They are rather shy and usually run for cover when found, so opportunities to photograph them are usually a matter of luck. They do on occasions forage in urban gardens where these afford dense cover. Now and again when surprised, rather than run for cover, they will flutter or climb up to a vantage point, providing the possibility of brief photo opportunities before flying to cover. 

Recently two Pheasant Coucals were heard calling in my daughter’s NSW Northern Rivers area garden. I grabbed the camera and carefully stepped out the front door to find the pair on the front lawn. One was noticeably smaller than the other. I managed one photo before they jumped the fence into a dense thicket of Tiger Grass. After a short wait, one bird – not sure if it was the male or the female – emerged from the grass and flew first to a shady shrub, then to the neighbouring house roof, from there back to my daughter’s house roof, then to a Jacaranda tree on the front fence and from there across the road to a large Blackwood Wattle tree. The series of photos in this post were taken in the seven locations described above. 

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The notes above and the following photos reveal what a strange bird the Coucal is. It has a somewhat fearsome appearance with red eyes and a strong hooked bill that are reminiscent of a raptor.