Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus)

The Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) is a medium-sized bird that averages between 32 to 37 centimeters in length. The males have solid gray coloring over their heads, neck and wings. Their bellies are white with gray to black stripes, dark gray tail feathers and black eyes. Bills are pointed and black of color. The female Cuckoo resembles the males, but with morphed brown coloring. The Common Cuckoo is a migratory bird and is seen across Europe, including Britain, as well as Japan and China, and migrates to Africa during the winter months. It adapts easily to live in cultivated areas, on the edges of dense forests, open country, marshes and coastal areas.

The Cuckoo has a wingspan of approximately 71 to 76 centimeters and has an extremely distinctive low flight. They fly with rapid ing beats and are very swift in flight. Their flight pattern bears a resemblance to that of raptors, with the exception that the Cuckoo has much weaker strokes and does not glide after a series of beats.

The preferred food of the Common Cuckoo includes a diet of hairy caterpillars, larvae and insects. Not being too fussy, they will also eat beetles, crickets and dragonflies, and have in some instances also been seen eating eggs and songbird nestlings. The female Cuckoo is not the best parent, to say the least. They are not interested in parenthood at all. She can lay in the region of eight to twenty five eggs, and the eggs can vary in color. Sometimes the eggs are brown with markings of lilac, gray, black and red-brown. At times eggs can be green, blue or red, with markings. This enables the Cuckoo to secretly lay an egg in another nest. Not all of the Cuckoo species find host parents for their eggs. The Common Cuckoo will find a species with similar eggs to her own and when the host parents are not in sight, she will lay her eggs amongst the eggs already in the nest. The host parents, not realizing anything is amiss, will complete the 11 to 13 day incubation period and rear the chicks until they are ready to fledge the nest. The female Cuckoo will never return or revisit her chick. Most of the time, the Common Cuckoo chick will be bigger in size than host parents, putting strain on the parents to feed the intruder.

Although the Common Cuckoo is a very wide-spread species and difficult to monitor, it is believed to be plentiful and is not threatened by extinction.