IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

Otago Witness, Issue 3860, 6 March 1928, Page 9

IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

THE SHINING CUCKOO.

By

J. Drummond,

F.LS., F.Z.S.

While visiting friends in Cambridge on February 5, Mr J. W. Stichbury, if Hamilton, heard a strange twitter in t, large fruit tree near the veranda. He saw a young shining cuckoo being fed by a pair of grey warblers. All members of the household came out to see the interesting sight, and the birds were observed for about half an hour. The cuckoo seemed to be almost fully grown, and, with the light on it at times, the sheen on its feathers was very beautiful. Mr Stichbury is convinced that the lit‘le fosterparents are very proud of their foster children, which give them no peace: ' ’1 his interesting study came ■ nder my notice previously when I lived at Epsom,” he states. “ I should like to know what other birds are known to rear young shining cuckoos. Can anybody state a definite case? ” He adds that in Wheturangi road, Green Lane, last year, children caught a young shining cuckoo in the garden. They kept it in a cage for two days. During that time it was fed by a pair of grey warblers, but, as it was injuring itself against the wires of its case, it was released.

lhe answer to Mr Stichbury’s question is that there are authentic cases of the bellbird, the tui, the tomtit, the wood lobin, the crown-cieeper, the white-eye. and the bush canary having fed young shining cuckoos, and cuckoo eggs have been found in the nests of fantails, blackbirds, chaffinches, and sparrows, but grey warblers, for some reason that is not clear, are most favoured by the parasitical cuckoos as their victims. Dr R. Fulton, Dunedin, who made a special study of New Zealand’s two species of cuckoos, and who was a careful observer, believed that where grey warblers were seen feeding mere than one cuckoo at the same time, the grey warblers were merely fosterfeeders, not fester-parents. The fact that another species of bird may be seen feeding young cuckoos is not absolute evidence that it has reared them. It may be acting in solicitude, its feelings having been worked upon by their distressingly plaintive notes

Another view held bv Dr Fulton, evidently, is that young cuckoos are either too helpless or too lazy to feed themselves. In support of this, he. mentions a case in which an observer, when roaming the bush, heard the piping notes of a bird in distress. He discovered a young shining cuckoo being fed by grey warblers. Later, he saw some shining cuckoos in a clover paddock infested with caterpillars. Thev were crawling all over the cuckoos’ feet, yet the cuckoos cried to the small birds to gc and feed them. Another somewhat strange aspect of the cuckoo question- mentioned by Dr Fulton is that, although the shining cuckoo’s egg usually is described as olive green, there have been found white eggs, blue eggs, creamy eggs, and abnormally elongated eggs which, he had no doubt, belonged to shining cuckoos. A farmer cut down a tree that contained a grey warbler's nest. Snugly placed amongst the feathers that lined the nest were three eggs. Two apparently the grey warblers’, were roundish, plump, and small, pale white, with brown spots. The third was a long, narrow, blue egg, not bulging in the middle, but gradually tapering from one end to the other. “ as if intended to. be carried in the bill of a cuckoo, and so placed in a nest.”

According to the observations of Mr W. W. Smith, New Plymouth, a cuckoo’s egg placed in the nest of a grey-warbler, a fantail, or a wood robin, takes 10 or 12 days to hatch. A young cuckoo is fullv fledged in about 16 days, after having taken as much food as a brood of four or five grey warblers wsuld have needed, perhaps more. It has been suggested that the grey warblers' time for nesting ;wid rearing their own families offers advantages to young cuckoos, and that this, in some way, actuates adult cuckoos in giving so much attention to grev warblers, the only birds in New Zealand, by the way, that build domed

As far ag plants are concerned, the kowhai seems to be the shining cuckoo’s favourite. The theory accounting for,,this is that “ the beautiful light green feathery leaves form an effective concealment.” In addition to this, the large kowhai moth and many other xnsects that shining cuckoos feed upon are found on that tree. The ngaip is another tree in which shining cuckoos ape seen fairly often. Great quan" tities of gnats, and their caterpillars., and moths and butterflies, are taken

by shining cuckoos, but they have been accused of taking fruit. Two shining cuckoos were watched feeding in a tree of Burbank plums until "they were “ literally gorged.”

There are exceptions to every rule. Most speries of cuckoos are parasitical. ’ The exceptions are some American species. There is no record of either a shining cuckoo or a long-tailed cuckoo in New Zealand having built a nest. The only suggestion of this outburst of industry was made by a prospector in th o Nelson province. He watched a pair of cuckoos catching insects over a pool of water. They always flew into the bush in one direction. At daylight one morning there wer© seven cuckoos at the pool, five of them young ones. The five sat on a branch while the adults fed them. The young became more like the adults, an<l took longer flights. Finally all disappeared, and were seen no more. Concealed by leaves and rubbish under a leaning dead stump in a cabbage tree there was a place which the prospector believed to be a nest. The description is not convincing. The theory that cuckoos were nest builders originally, and gradually and slowly acquired parasitism may be correct; but neither the shining cuckoq nor the long-tailed cuckoo show anv inclination to revert to the industrious habit.

The long-tailed cuckoo, as far as i? known, uses tho nest of the bush-canary in preference to the nest of any other bird. Its egg is abort the same size as the shining cuckoo's, and is very similar in colour. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to state definitely, <m the colour of the egg alone, if it belongs to the brightly-apparelled, sweet-throated cuckoo or to its brown-coated, screechy, long-tailed congener. Oology, the study of eggs, is unsatisfactory on account of the variation in the colours of eggs laid by members of the same species. In eggs of the common guillemot of the Old Country, the ground colour varies from white to buff, fawn colour, pale brown, pale blue, and full blue, and the markings range in colour from russet brown to jet black, and in character from scattered blotches to delicate reticulations. The grey warbler, the tomtit, the whiteeye, and the wood-pigeon have been seen feeding young long-tailed cuckoos, and eggs believed to be long-tailed cucko'S* have been found in nests of the grey warbler, the white-eye, and the tomtit, as well as in nests of the bush-canary.

A large brown seabird with a laboured flight, described by a visitor to Stewart Island, is a Nelly, a bird of bad repute. The whole literature of birds, probably, contains no friendly or complimentary reference to it. It is described as a filthy bird, and as the vulture of cue seas. Where quantities of refuse have been deposited, particularly at sealing and whaling stations, the Nelly may be seen gorging itself to repletion. It hovers over sealers and devours the carcase as soon as the men have left. Penguins shot by an exploring party in the Antarctic were eaten by a Nelly before there was time to row a boat round a piece of rock to pick them up. Sailors believe that a Nelly will attack a drowning man, and will begin its horrid mea) before the man is dead. The Nelly’s home is the spacious Southern Ocean. Its nests on cliffs of southern islands within this Domi’ /', are found with difficulty. When a person approaches, the adult bird keeps a short distance away, and the unpleasant youngsters squirt a Horribly smelling oil out of their mouths for six or eight feet. The Nelly is a membet of tho petrel family, characterised by tubular nostrils. Officially it is Ossifraga gigantea, the gigantic bone-breaker.

A petrel of a different type is justly praised by the same correspondent, w’ o has seen it, but only in the winter months in Foveaux Strait and near the coast of Stewart Island. This is. the Cape pigeon, which also roams in the Southern Ocean. As it is seen in large numbers in the summer at the Snares, the Auckland and the Antipodes Islands, it probably nests there, each bird laying a single white Ogg, as in the case of all petrels. Its colours give a handsome speckled appearance. Its head is very black, its breast is white, and its back is white spotted with black. Finally, the same correspondent has watched with delight flocks of whale-birds, fairly small petrels, with light grey costumes. ' They fly in zig-zag courses with sharp movements of their wings, aud they may be recognised by a dark mark like a W on their expanded wings.