One fine morning after usual walk we almost all above 60 years, 12-15 friends used to sit in a hut for yoga/excise or any other individual activities it is a time to relax and plenty of time to discuss politics/health related problems and sometimes discussion starts regarding drinks and non-veg. Sometimes it took hot discussion on politics, all types of jokes and more amazing a “Prathna”( a religious rituals) and everything normalised before disperse. One day there was a discussion on DNA which followed by many instances of ancient history and one questioned the legitimately of father? One quoted an example that " ਯਾਰ ਛੱਡ ਪਰਾਂ -ਕਦੇ ਕੋਇਲ ਵੀ ਅਪਣੇ ਬੱਚੇ ਪਾਲਦੀ ਆ " This phrase was discussed threadbare and after so many myths and no result. Since, I am a wild-life photographer the question ultimately passed on to me to answer. One of my friend said " ਏਨੂੰ ਪੂਛੋ ਸਾਰਾ ਦਿਨ ਕੈਮਰਾ ਗੱਲ ਵਿਚ ਪਾ ਕੇ ਜੰਗਲਾਂ ਵਿਚ ਘੁੰਮਦਾ ਆ "| But I also heard it and did not knew this fact. I simply promised them to explain later and honestly admitted that I will watch the specific bird and study and only thereafter I will be able to tell you. It took a week to study books, Google search the bird itself and monitor its behaviour. This reminds me of a famous phrase that “A foolish man built up a house and a wise man lives in it”.
The Cuckoo is also called Koyal/Koyila/Kokila which is not able to built nest or hatch the eggs of their own may be because of their size. Mostly they lay their eggs in the crow’s, Drongo’s or other bee-eater nest as they cannot differentiate between its own and Cuckoo’s eggs and more the hatched eggs looks like the same of the host parents. The Koel is also reported to use the Jungle Crow as its foster parent in some areas, and there are also rare reports of its conning oriole and drongo species. Starling and mynas are their victims in Malaysia.
It is said that the cuckoo never brought up their own babies. It is true as the diet of the adult Cuckoos are fruits but their baby bird’s needs lots of protein rich diet to grow quickly and healthily as is required for all baby birds. Cuckoo is Brood parasites, which mean to organisms that rely on others to raise their young. As an adult Cuckoo depends upon fruits but its baby bird’s needs non-vegetarian food full of rich protein? So female Cuckoo lays its eggs in hurry in the nest of other birds like Crow, Drongos or other bee-eater birds whose eggs mimic and resemble to hosts eggs and by doing so it break and through away the original eggs of the birds and replace its own. Cuckoo is not only the bird which uses this strategy. Cuckoo species and some other birds like Brown Headed Cowbirds use Mafia tactics. The female will watch the nest in which she lays her egg. If the host pushes out the Cuckoo's egg, the female Cuckoo will return to the nest and throw out the host's eggs. By virtue of experience host birds have come to learn that it is better to raise an extra chick than to lose all their own. It hardly matters if the eggs may mimic the host's eggs or not or even identified by the host.
This behaviour of the Cuckoo cannot be called laziness, evil or negativity rather host never seen step motherly treatment but continue to nourish with love, generously and up-lift until the babies. As the Cuckoos eggs have thicker and stronger shell and hatches much faster than the original host bird eggs and started chirp to drive the attention of the host parents to feed them non-vegetarian rich protein and sometimes destroy the hatching process of the host parent’s eggs. Crows/Drangos or other bee-eater birds feed them until they start chirping, and when host identifies the difference between its own babies then kicks the Cuckoo's babies out of the nest. By that time they grow enough strong wings to fly.
The cuckoo is one of the most widespread breeding birds in Europe, and is only absent from Iceland. It also breeds throughout Asia east to Japan. Female cuckoo lays between 12 to 22 eggs per season almost one each in different nests. Unlike most birds, female cuckoos lay their eggs in the afternoon rather than the morning. Though cuckoo eggs usually resemble those of their host, around 20% are rejected so never hatch.
Though there are 54 species of Old World cuckoos, just two live in Europe: most live in Africa, Asia and Australasia. The common cuckoo is the only member of the family that calls cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo while others have loud voices but totally different calls. One can hear its sounds in spring session and if you respond to its voices loudly it continue to repeat.
It is usually said that Crow is smart but Cuckoo is smarter and even smart guys are duped by the Asian Koel scientifically known as (Eudynakys scolopaceus) that is why it is called a truant parent and to ensure well keep-up and highly protein diet takes on the role of a brood parasite of the house crow. The female Koel smartly approaches the un-guarded nest of the house crow in the evening lay eggs and slip away. The male play the role of distracting the house crow to help the female to do the job. It is also reported that the Koel being fed along with young House Crows and sometimes there were only Koel young. This depends on whether the mother Koel was able to remove the crow’s eggs (or may be the nestlings later on) from the nest. Unlike some parasitic cuckoos, the nestlings of Koel are reported not to eject the young of their foster parents. “I have seen fledglings of Why has not anybody attempted an in-depth study of the fascinating House Crow-Asian Koel relationship? In fact, this subject was suggested as a topic for a doctoral dissertation by the late Mr. J.C. Daniel (former Director of the BNHS), but the student was not interested, commenting later to me “a PhD on crows”! With surveillance and spy cameras now much more easily available and cheaper, obtaining data for a study would be much easier — any takers?”
I was keen to know if it happening for a long time then why there is no decline in the population of crows? I found the answer from Daniela Canestrari and her team at the University of Oviedo in Spain new research studied the nests of crows, both with and without cuckoos. However, new research is challenging our understanding of this relationship. Daniela They found that nests with both species actually fared better, because baby cuckoo birds actually defended the nests from predators, thereby boosting the crow population. "In ecology, there are many different kinds of interactions between different species," Canestrari told me. "What we concluded from this study is that classifying these interactions as parasitic or mutualistic maybe is not so correct, because sometimes these interactions can be quite complex." And his team discovered that this population was parasitized by the great spotted cuckoo and they monitored the crows nest and counted the number of eggs, the number that hatched and the number of chicks that fledged and left the nest.
The data for this study was collected over the course of 16 years. Canestrari's team made the discovery while studying the social behaviours of crows. "We realized that this population was parasitized by the great spotted cuckoo," she said. As they monitored the crows' nests, they counted the number of eggs, the number that hatched and the number of chicks that fledged and left the nest and realized by chance that the nests that were parasitized were more likely to be successful.
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Kulbhushan Kanwar,
kulbhushankanwar@gmail.com
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