Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Common cuckoo
Cuculus canorus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common cuckoo is a slim grey bird that never builds a nest of its own and never raises a single one of its own chicks. Instead the female lays her eggs in the nests of much smaller birds. They feed the young cuckoo as if it were their own.
Picture credit: Jerzy Strzelecki (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Afsarnayakkan (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Tisha Mukherjee (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common cuckoo live?
Home: woodland edges, reedbeds and open country.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Sweden, Russia, Spain, Italy.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 33 cm long, wingspan about 55–60 cm. It weighs about 0.12 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
In spring the male cuckoo arrives in Europe from Africa and calls his own name from a high branch. The female watches other birds, such as reed warblers and meadow pipits, while they build their nests. When the owners fly off, she drops down, swallows one of their eggs and lays one of her own in its place, all in about ten seconds. Her egg often matches the host eggs in colour, so the small parents do not notice the swap. The cuckoo chick hatches after about eleven or twelve days, earlier than its nest mates, and pushes the other eggs over the edge with its back. The foster parents then feed a chick that soon grows far bigger than they are. By late summer the young cuckoo flies to Africa alone, without ever having met its real parents.
Find it on the globe
Common cuckoo is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why does the cuckoo not build a nest?
Instead of raising chicks, the female spends the whole summer looking for nests to use. That lets her lay far more eggs than a bird that stays with one brood, although most of her chicks still do not survive.
How does the cuckoo chick get so much food?
It begs loudly and opens a wide orange mouth that the foster parents can hardly resist. One chick can beg like a whole brood, so the small parents keep carrying food even when the cuckoo towers over them.
Do the host birds ever fight back?
Yes. Some reed warblers recognise a strange egg and throw it out or leave the nest, so cuckoos have to copy the host's egg pattern closely. It is a slow contest that has lasted thousands of years.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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