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.

Host birds are not unaware of the Diederik cuckoo, and will often mob them en mass. I saw this in Rietvlei where the photos were taken, and it was what led me to park next to the dead tree. I saw that the southern masked weavers often chased the cuckoos away, and they went to perch in the dead tree. It is known that sometimes a cuckoo is killed by his mobbing, especially by the southern masked weaver.