Shining Cuckoo – Pīpīwharauroa

Mcbeath k, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Chrysococcyx lucidus

Description

About the size of a small thrush.

They have iridescent dark green plumage upperparts and white below with narrow dark green transverse bands. Immature plumage is slightly duller, especially on the throat and chest, with less distinct ventral barring. Shining Cuckoos are heard more often than seen as they tend to live in bush or dense foliage. They spend the spring, summer and autumn in New Zealand and the winters in the Bismarck Archipelago (New Guinea) and Solomon Islands. A distance of 3,755 kilometers

Call

Shining Cuckoos have a distinctive whistling call. Many people believe hearing the first Shining Cuckoo call is the start of spring weather.

Food

Predominantly insects. Shining Cuckoos have the ability to eat toxic insects like hairy caterpillars and ladybirds.

Breeding

From mid-October the Shining Cuckoo lays a single egg in the nest of its host species, usually a grey warbler. The egg is larger than the grey warbler’s eggs and is olive green (the grey warbler’s eggs are paler, often almost white, and sometimes speckled). It hatches at approximately 15 days and, when a few days old, the Cuckoo chick evicts the grey warbler eggs or chicks. The chick fledges at about 19 days and continues to be fed by both grey warbler foster parents for at least 4 weeks.

Threats and conservation

Although still common and not under threat they are preyed on by rats and possums while in the warblers nest and cats and mustelids. protecting Grey warblers is important for the substantially of Shining Cuckoo populations

Good pest control will ensure both of their futures

For more information about birds of the Tangihua forest see below