As the Olympics wound down into the second week of August I had my attention on a statistic and record of another kind. I was keen to improve on my first sighting of a cuckoo at the end of winter.
Although welcome swallows might be the official bird of spring – and I take note of the dates of their arrival, too – the fan-tailed cuckoo is always the first of the migrants to arrive in my neighbourhood.
As soon as I hear the cuckoo’s persistent trilling coming from the forest above my home, I know it’s time to get out and about to look and listen for the other visitors arriving from the mainland.
Usually there’s a time lag of about 20 days between hearing the song of the cuckoo, and that of another early arrival, the striated pardalote, before the other travellers arrive from the mainland.
I once listened to the cuckoos with a sense of dread, knowing the disruption they caused to the bird world by outsourcing parenting. Then I discovered that some of these victims were learning to fight back.
The cuckoo’s reputation for dropping its eggs in the nests of unsuspecting birds is well known but what is still being discovered is the lengths some of these smaller birds go to, to thwart the cuckoo’s intentions.
Researchers have discovered some superb fairy-wrens are capable of realising that the rapidly growing single chick in their nests is actually cuckoo offspring. In this case, they simply desert the nest and build a new one, leaving the cuckoo to die.
Another anti-cuckoo strategy is revealed in the August edition of BirdLife Australia’s newsletter, which this month gives special attention to the fan-tailed cuckoo and its behaviour.
It appears another victim targeted by the cuckoo, the yellow-rumped thornbill, builds a fake, cup-shaped nest on top of their real nest to fool cuckoos into laying their eggs in the wrong one. The nests are domed and when the breeding season gets firmly under way I intend to check them out at a spot I often see the thornbills, in the Waverley Floral Park on the Eastern Shore.
The fan-tailed cuckoo is one of four members of the family visiting Tasmania. It has a beauty that belies its anti-social habits, grey on the back and washed with pink on the underside. The tail has black-and-white stripes.
The other family members seen in Tasmania are the pallid cuckoo, the shining bronze-cuckoo and the Horsfield bronze-cuckoo.
Although I’ve seen them all, the fantail remains my favourite. No summer evening is complete without the loud trilling, delivered on a descending scale, echoing through bush and suburb.
The first cuckoo did not beat the August 12th record this year. I had to wait until the third week of August for the music of summer to begin