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.

Sexual selection of this bird may not be the only selection pressure leading to dimorphism in cuckoos. For example, recent studies have shown that female plumage became more cryptic with the evolution of brood parasitism. The degree to which this generalisation applies to the Diederik cuckoo is not known. We Homo sapiens, and many other mammals, probably also have characteristics that arose from sexual selection by female choice. In our case, sexual selection may even have played a role in the evolution of intelligence. It may also be that human traits such as humour, music, visual art, verbal creativity, and some forms of altruism, are courtship adaptations that have been favoured through sexual selection. So know your birds, know yourself.