Like most of us I learnt at school that there is a bird called a cuckoo, it lays its eggs in other birds nests and says "Cuckoo, cuckoo." Just for good measure the teacher may have added a comment about the cuckoo's apparent laziness because it lets other birds raise the cuckoo's young. Australian schools back then were dominated with European or British thoughts and customs as some of us may remember.
Europe has one cuckoo, tropical Australia has 13 different cuckoo species that range in size from the huge migrating Channel-billed Cuckoo to the diminutive sedentary Little Bronze-Cuckoo that we have in our own backyards. The big pheasant looking bird we see by the side of the road in the country is a cuckoo and is called the Pheasant Coucal. Coucals make a nest, lay eggs in it, incubate the eggs and raise their young.
This is starting to diverge from what I was taught in school? So it should, Cuckoos are part of the natural world and do fantastic jobs dispersing plant seeds and controlling insects from such unlikely habitats as the arid interior to the lush green rainforests. In the Daintree on our dawn river trip we see and hear cuckoos in November: www.daintreerivertours.com.au
Another big migrating cuckoo is the Eastern Koel, formerly known as the Common Koel. There is probably a pair of Eastern Koels within a kilometre of you right now. If you can't see them you will hear them with their loud "Koel, koel, koel…." call early in the morning. These cuckoos lay their eggs in Helmeted Friarbirds nests which is a comparatively easy feat. The friarbird's nests are built like a bucket and so it easy for a cuckoo to lay an egg directly into it. Spare a thought for the Brush Cuckoo that you can hear right now with it's call being repeated over and over again 24 hours a day. In our area Brush Cuckoos follow the small Brown-backed Honeyeaters down from the north in spring and wait for an opportunity to put an egg in their nests. The problem is that this nest is not open at the top like a friarbirds, this nest is some what like a sunbird's nest with the entrance in the side. The size of the entrance is way too small to allow the cuckoo inside to lay an egg.  Problem solved, lay the egg on the ground, pick it up in the bill and post it like a letter into the nest entrance!
So how do I know what a cuckoo looks like? If you don't have a field guide, look for birds with long tails and or barring across the breast. If you see either of these characteristics you will be most likely be looking at a cuckoo.

Chris Dahlberg

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