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.

Diederik cuckoo males and females have a particularly distinct ritual feeding behaviour. After sighting a female, a male will court the female with song, and then he will fetch her a caterpillar. During this ritual feeding, the male and female engage in a vigorous dance of bobbing up and down with wings partially spread. Presumably not all such encounters are successful, but I have not observed one that wasn't so I don't know what the outcome would be. In a successful encounter, the caterpillar is passed from the male to the female, with an extended time – several seconds – when both birds hold one end of the caterpillar. Eventually the male lets go, and may fly off to fetch another. I have not managed to see them copulating yet, but when they do, the female flies off to lay a single egg in a host nest.