By Burt Glover
September 3, 2023

Every year, I wait and watch for the springtime arrival of “my” Yellow-Billed Cuckoos from their South American wintering grounds. While I’ve only ever seen them on three or four occasions, the landscape would seem empty without them. Now that summer is drawing nigh, I’m still waiting to see them. Cuckoos are very reclusive birds. Many people go their whole lives without realizing we have Yellow-Billed Cuckoos in our area. While sightings may be rare, they do have a way of making their presence known. 

My yard provides ideal habitat — generous tree canopy from the surrounding woods, bordered with open sky and, nearby, creeks and ponds. Come May, I’ll be sitting in my backyard soaking up the springtime sun when, all of the sudden, I’ll hear that familiar Cuckoo song emanating from the depths of some dense foliage. Song? Well, I’ll admit that description is a little generous. To me, it sounds more like a frog, or, as others have described it, a door knocker hitting a metal plate. It is a rapid, throaty “ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kow-kow-kow-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp.” Not a typical bird song, I’ll admit.

Often, loud noises, such as thunder, will provoke them to burst forth in this “song,” which has led to their alternate name as Rain Crows — foretellers of rain. This year, I learned that Cuckoos actually have two songs. As the summer days laten, they may switch their song to something that sounds more like a Mourning Dove. It is rather continuous and lengthy “ooh-ooh-ooh,” or it could be described as “coo-coo-coo-coo.”

Thinking about this for a short time, I had to smack myself in the head. I realized that this is how they got their name! Coo-coo. Cuckoo! Sometimes I’m a little slow at catching on to these things. A range of their song variations can be here at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library. Below is a short clip from of a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo calling from the trees of an Arkansas farmstead. 

During my online research this week, I learned that the words “kook” and “kooky” are derived from the name of this bird. How anyone can characterize Cuckoos as being crazy is beyond me. It seems that, in the olden days, people heard these birds cooing incessantly throughout the day and began labeling anyone who speaks senselessly and pointlessly as being cuckoo. 

Although the subject was in debate for quite a while, it has been determined that the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) is indeed related to the European Cuckoo (of clock fame). Also in the family is the South American Ani (of crossword puzzle fame) and the Roadrunner (of Saturday morning cartoon fame). 

If you should ever be lucky enough to see one, they are very beautiful birds — long and slender, about 10 to 12 inches in length, with light brown coloration above and a clean white color below. Also, there is a large cinnamon-colored patch on each wing. Most distinctive to me is the long black tail with bold white spots on the underside. When flying, that long tail seems to flap in the breeze– just as might a flag or a banner. 

Cuckoos are very shy and retiring birds. They mostly sit in the depths of some dense tree watching for movement… a cicada, a katydid, a beetle, a small lizard or frog. These are a part of their diet. What Cuckoos are best known for, however, is their voracious appetite for caterpillars. In the northern part of their range, they consume plentiful quantities of Gypsy Moth caterpillars. In our neck of the woods, they eat Tent Caterpillars (Malacocoma americanum) in the spring, and Webworms (Hyphantria cunea) in the fall. A single Cuckoo can down 100 caterpillars in one sitting. 

Contrary to popular belief, the foliage-munching Tent Caterpillars and Webworms, (which are actually caterpillars), do not typically damage trees. At worst, the sight may be aesthetically displeasing for a while. But the leaves grow back, and life goes on. The populations of these caterpillars are actually kept in check by predators such as birds, spiders and wasps. In the spring, Tent Caterpillars are an important food source for many nesting birds and for the many species of migrating birds arrive to our area. The Webworms of autumn likewise provide migrating birds with the energy they need to return to their wintering grounds — a distance that, in the case of the Yellow-Billed Cuckoos, may range as far south as Argentina. 

Property owners tempted to take up arms by poisoning and torching these caterpillars would do well to remember the old saw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. To a bird at the beginning or the end of a very long journey, the sight of a webbed nest in a tree is a thing of beauty, indeed.

September is here, and soon it will be time for the Cuckoos and the youngsters they have raised to return to their wintering grounds in South and Central America. I do so worry about them and their perilous journeys. Being night fliers, there is the constant danger of losing course due to light pollution and to collisions with buildings and communication towers (cell, TV, and others). An American Bird Conservancy study of just 17 of these towers reported the deaths of 586 Cuckoos from collision with guy wires and the towers themselves. Sadly, 4 to 5 million songbirds are killed yearly during migration in these collisions. Between the man-made hazards of migration, pesticides and habitat loss, the numbers of Yellow-Billed Cuckoos are said to be in steep decline. To be sure, I will be anxiously awaiting the return of “my” birds next year. In his poem ‘To the Cuckoo,’ William Wordsworth may have said it best.

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery. 

Contributor Burt Glover became an accidental naturalist during his earliest childhood days exploring the dirt roads, backyards, polo field and barns of the Magnolia-Knox-Mead neighborhood of 1950s Aiken. Birds are his first love, and he can identify an impressive range by song alone. He asserts that he is an observer, not an expert, on the topics of his writings, which range from birds, box turtles, frogs and foraging, to wasps, weeds, weather and beyond.