Is the Cuckoo Bird really cuckoo?

 (Léase en español / Read in Spanish)

What comes to your mind when you think of a “Cuckoo Bird”? How about a cuckoo clock? Or the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”? Or perhaps the phrase ‘out of cloud cuckoo land’? I have to say that I always imagined the cuckoo bird to be a small, cute, innocent-looking, albeit slightly crazy, bird.
 
Well Bolivia is full of surprises, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when we saw a real-life cuckoo bird.

We first saw these birds in Santa Cruz while visiting Bolivia two years ago and at the
time we didn’t have a bird guide to identify them. So we just called them ‘dinosaur birds’ since they are a bit scary and dinosaur-like. Well, maybe not scary, but they do have an ‘untidy’ appearance, like they didn’t comb their hair before leaving the house.

Now we know better. This is the Guira Cuckoo. The head is a reddish-ochre with dark feather shafts that form a retractable, unkempt crest. The back feathers are dark brown with light colored shafts. The rump is white while their throat and breast are white-ochre streaked dark. Their long 8-inch multi-colored tail starts as yellowish-ochre at the base, and then has dark brown feathers at the center with the rest being black except for a broad white tip.

 
Their habitat is open areas in savannahs, gardens, wood edges and fields. They feed on frogs, eggs, small birds (like nestlings), and small mammals such as mice. They are social birds, seen in flocks between 6 and 20 in size. Although they are tree-dwelling birds they are frequently seen on the ground. Without spreading out much, they seem to always be facing and moving in the same direction, more like a herd than a flock, foraging for food.

What about their reputation for being ‘crazy’? Well, the truth is they don’t have a reputation for being agile fliers. In fact they are a bit clumsy in flight, mostly gliding or hopping from one perch to another. However, unlike its European cousins, the Guira Cuckoo does not have the reputation of laying its eggs in the nest of another unsuspecting bird, and then leaving them to hatch and take over the nest. So perhaps the Bolivian Cuckoo is not so ‘cuckoo’ after all.

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Now for the details:

1. Family: Cuculidae
2. Latin name: Guira Guira
3. Size: 40cm (15.75 inches)
4. Voice: Series of descending ‘kee-ey, kee-ey, kee-eh, kee-orr, keeorr, cure curecure’; for alarm: a long high-pitched ‘keerrrrrrrrr’; in flight: a quiet ‘yew yew yew yew...’
5. Common names:

• English: Guira Cuckoo
• South American: Pirincho (Argentina, Bolivia); Serere (Bolivia); Pirincho común (Uruguay); Piririgua (Paraguay); Anu-branco (Brazil)

 (Léase en español / Read in Spanish)