Meet Diederik Cuckoo, One Of The Most Beautiful Bird In The World

This article is about Diederik cuckoo (Chrysococcyx caprius). I wrote it for two reasons: to talk a bit about beauty of this amazing bird and to illustrate something about these birds biology. They are more than just pretty colours. Diederik cuckoo are inter-African migrants that are coming back to SA around now (October), and their breeding season is about to get started. So it is a good time to learn something about them.

M.A. Macdonald studied Diederik cuckoo in southern Ghana from 1975 to 1978 and found that most food was taken from or close to the ground, and consisted mainly of caterpillars or similar larvae. This is also true in South Africa, rarely do they seem to eat much of anything else. Interestingly, the caterpillars that they eat are poisonous to most other birds. It is interesting that Klass's Cuckoo also eat mainly caterpillars, but they avoid competition by virtue of the fact that they have different brood hosts, and also to some extent different habitats.