I have been trying for the past several weeks to get a good look at a yellow-billed cuckoo, so far without success. I have heard its call many times, but always from thickets so dense I couldn’t locate the bird.
As a group the cuckoos are reproductively innovative. The three species of the genus Crotophagus, commonly known as anis, are group nesters. They hang together in flocks of as many as 20 birds, and when the urge strikes they build a communal nest. All the females in the flock lay eggs in the nest, and everybody joins in to incubate the eggs and feed the young after they hatch.
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Other cuckoos, including some of the tropical species, are brood parasites. The common cuckoo, a species whose range includes all of Europe, is a brood parasite whose habit of laying its eggs in other birds’ nests is the source of the word “cuckold.” It is also the source of the joke in the rhyme about flying over the cuckoo’s nest. There ain’t no such thing as a cuckoo’s nest.
Some of the English songs survive in the southern Appalachians, but the words have changed from “Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird / She sings as she flies” to “She warbles as she flies” and ultimately to “She wobbles as she flies / She don’t never holler cuckoo ’til the fourth day of July.” A person singing those words obviously knows nothing about common cuckoos. The two cuckoos of eastern North America, the yellow-billed and the more northerly black-billed, are late migrants, yet even they are likely to be singing by Memorial Day. Yet I’ve never heard anybody sing “She don’t never holler cuckoo ’til the last weekend in May.”
This is more a case of dumping than of nest parasitism. Dumping is common behavior. Eggs, like human babies, come when they are ready to come. If everything is as it should be, an appropriate nest will be ready to receive the eggs. But if a storm, a raccoon, or something else has destroyed the nest the bird has to find another place to deposit its eggs. The nest of another bird–of the same or different species–becomes the avian equivalent of the church steps, and there the foundlings are deposited.
