Cuckoos - Tent Caterpillar Birds

This is Bird Note.

This staccato call tells us there's a yellow-billed cuckoo nearby.

One of two species of cuckos in the woodlands of North America.

The yellow-billed lives in broadly forests throughout the east

and riparian stands in the southwest.

They work common breeding birds in the Pacific Northwest

as late as the 1920s.

But then they disappeared.

Ornithologists still don't know why.

The black-billed cuckoo is a more northerly species

living in dense woodland, even conifer forests.

Cuckos perch quietly and scan their surroundings for food.

Hairy tent caterpillars, shunned by most birds,

are often on their meal ticket.

So, if you have an infestation of tent caterpillars,

you might see one of these slender brown and white birds

with long, white-spotted tails.

The cuckoo plugs a caterpillar from its tent

and manipulates it back and forth in its bill,

taking off many of the bothersome hairs.

But some of them remain,

and cuckoostumics are sometimes lined with these hairs.

When the hairs are dense enough to prevent digestion,

the entire stomach lining is cast off and regurgitated.

Nature finds surprising ways to deal with problems.

For Bird Note, I'm Mary McCann.

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