Shining example of a naughty bird

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 16

Shining example of a naughty bird

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

A shining cuckoo, singing in the hedge one dewy morning, has been this month’s most welcome visitor, though I’m not sure why, because you would have to go a long way to find a more illmannered, thriftless, and selfish creature. I guess it’s because the cuckoo is just a pretty face, with voice, to match.

You don't see many shining cuckoos, not in built-up areas, though it is one of our best-known birds and was one of the first to be named by European explorers; but I suspect that it is more common than many people believe, because it is shy (except when doing its nestpoaching trick), doesn’t move about much except at dawn and dusk, and at a distance could easily be mistaken for a young thrush or blackbird.

Forster, the naturalist on Captain Cook’s second voyage, named the shining cuckoo from a specimen he found in Queen Charlotte Sound, but many decades passed before its nasty habits were revealed and documented by Ernst Dieffenbach, naturalist and explorer for the New Zealand Company at the beginning of the 1840 s (there is a hebe named for him in the Chathams).

It is a mystery to me why this pretty bird is surrounded by romantic mystique. It is surely the most ill-mannered and selfish of critters — a shiftless nomad which wafts

off to have a good time while others take on the task of .rearing its young. Not only does the cuckoo expect other birds to rear its offspring — it frequently smashes the nest while getting in to lay its egg, and leaves the putative foster parents to repair the damage. Wonder of wonders, they invariably do so. Then, when the young cuckoo hatches after 12 days, its first action is to toss all unhatched eggs and any hatched offspring of its host out of the nest; and the hosts accept this and go on feeding the young cuckoo, which within a very short time is bigger than they are and squealing so loudly that it has most of the birds in the area bringing it food. The favoured foster parent of the shining cuckoo is the grey warbler, one of our

smallest birds, and as there are warblers in our district it is not surprising we should get a few cuckoos. They are usually there to be heard and not seen, though we did have a young one living in the garden for a few days a season or two back — it turned up one early autumn day and stayed a while, browsing on various garden fauna, before departing, headed I imagine north to join the annual winter migration to the Solomon

Islands, where the cuckoos winter in the tropical sun before returning to New Zealand in spring to breed.

The first flocks are expected in the far north of New Zealand in August, and as the weather warms up they work their way south, reaching their southern limit on Stewart Island by November.

Where there are a lot of cuckoos the effect on local populations of grey warblers must be dramatic, because once a cuckoo has hatched in a warbler’s nest the destruction of the warbler’s offspring is inevitable. But- as far as man is concerned cuckoos are beneficial; their diet consists almost' entirely of insects, and their favourite is a big eater that other birds leave alone. Fisherman know this beas-

tie as the “woolly worm." It is the hairy caterpillar of the magpie moth, which feeds on the leaves of various kinds of groundsel, ragwort, various garden daisies, and in milder areas the naturalised plant known as “Cape Ivy,” actually a kind of climbing daisy. A big patch of one of these weeds is a sure-fire way of attracting shining cuckoos, though the local noxiousplant inspector might see it differently. The call of the shining

cuckoo is unmistakeable. The bird is a ventriloquist, and its call seems to start from a long way away, swelling slowly to a crescendo via a series of rising, slurred notes, repeated several times and trailing off in a series of downward slurs. Maoris rendered the call as “Kui, kui, kui, kui, whiu, whitiora.” Often you hear only the first part of the call in spring and early summer — it is as though the birds have to learn the whole thing over every year.

The shining cuckoo is one of the larger bush birds, bigger than the bellbird but smaller than the blackbird, and one of the prettier ones, too, with its barred breast and metallic green upper body. If you see one this summer the chances are it will be a male, because cuckoos go in for a population imbalance in which females . are heavily outnumbered — each female may have three or four or more "husbands." This is a curious reversal of roles in the natural world, almost as curious as the habit of abandoning the young for others to rear; or perhaps a sideeffect of it, a natural way of ensuring that every precious egg is thoroughly fertilised. But the shining cuckoo is a curious bird all round. Females, by the way, differ externally from the males only in having a bit more purplish bronze colouring on the back of the neck.

Another interesting traveller which seems to be abnormally abundant this year is the white-faced heron. It seems like only a few years since it was regarded as a rare thing to see this bird, but now it seems to pop up in the countryside at every turn.

This heron comes from Australia, is self-introduced.

and has been recorded in New Zealand’s avifauna since 1865, but until recent years it was just a straggler. When the revised edition of W. R. B. Oliver’s classic book on New Zealand birds came out in 1955 the editors were able to find only one example (in a swamp at Waikuku) of the white-faced heron nesting in Canterbury.

Now it is a common species, not just on the coast but on the plains arid in the foothills, and you quite often see herons apparently resident in quite dry paddocks, though nearly always there is a water-race nearby in which I imagine they find their food — cockabullies, young trout, and various creepie-crawlies. They are waders, and anglers could learn a lot about the art of still-fishing by watching them. Seemingly possessed of endless patience, they will wade out knee-deep, stand perfectly motionless for as long as’ they need to, and suddenly strike a small fish, frog, or whatever edible small creature comes-within range.

They nest in trees, handy

to water, in one of the most untidy dwellings you could find — a large, loose structure made of twigs. At first glance it could be mistaken for a magpie's nest, but it is more basic. The magpie at least puts a lining of dried grass in its nest, but the white-faced heron cannot be bothered with refinements, and it brings up its young on bare boards.