A cuckoo surprise to start the day

Unpredictably is one of the true pleasures of birding. You simply have no clue when something unusual will appear.

So it was Saturday when I pulled into the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm parking lot around 7 o’clock in the morning. I had just put my car in park when Lee pulled in beside me.

I’d seen Lee on a couple of previous Pole Farm visits, and little did we know that we were in for a treat almost immediately on our walk. We left the lot, headed up the trail and quickly spotted a bird in the big tree to our left.

The tree is almost fully leafed out. It took us a while to get a fix on the bird, which would land for a few seconds, then pop over to another branch. The bird was long and slender with a pale belly and a vivid red eye ring, leading us to an unexpected conclusion: it was a cuckoo, a visitor that stops by briefly each spring.

But which cuckoo was it — black-billed or yellow-billed?

I had a devil of a time trying to focus on the bird, and Lee was giving it his best efforts, too. After a few minutes, the bird flew over to the alley of trees to the left of the main trail. Lee and I followed but lost sight of the bird.

I checked Merlin’s photos of cuckoos, and the red eye ring pointed us toward black-billed. Lee checked his camera, and he had a clear shot that showed a black bill. Without a doubt, we’d seen a black-billed cuckoo.

I didn’t bother to check my photos until I got home. The best of the lot tops this post, and it shows the bird’s black bill and the red rim on eye.

Lee and I came out of the tree alley and headed up the central path. There were plenty of birds, but few that popped into sight long enough for me to grab a shot. Eventually we reached the AT&T Building One oval, hoping to find a few warblers. No dice. We moved along toward the Lawrence Hopewell trail and as soon as we hit the pavement, we heard the rapid bub-bub-bub call of a cuckoo from the trees.

I whipped out my Merlin app. Within a few seconds, the screen lit up: “black-billed cuckoo.” I saved the recording but didn’t realize until I got home that I also caught a bit of Lee and me talking.

He’d been telling me about a relatively close encounter he’d had with a red-shouldered hawk, and we heard the cuckoo in about the same spot. Once we heard the cuckoo, we wanted to see it. I suggested looping around on a side trail, as you can hear on the recording.

When you hit play, you can heard the cuckoo calling faintly. You’ll hear Lee and me talking, then hear the bird again. The “good stuff” goes on for about 40 seconds, and the rest of the recording (which I didn’t have time to trim) plays itself out with the cuckoo thrumming and a mourning dove hooting in the distance.

Was it the same bird that we saw at the start of our walk? We’ll never know. The bird near the parking lot wasn’t calling, and we couldn’t see the second one (not that it would have made a difference. Birds don’t wear nametags!). I logged one cuckoo on e-Bird. Whether it was one or two, it was a treat, and it made our day. 🦅