Hi all, I just heard a YELLOW-BILLED CI|UCKOO high over my house at 10:50 this evening -- giving the long "K'OW K'OW" call series.
thanks for all the info and anecdotes on mid-summer calling in cuckoos, I am aware of the odd mid-summer calling and I have heard (mostly BBCU} on warm summer nights. I also hear a scattering of calls from both cuckoos, along with few thrushes and other migrants) consistently through the first week of June. The birds I heard were high in the sky and appeared to be moving (but it is certainly possible that I m wrong. KEN. Ken Rosenberg Conservation Science Program Cornell Lab of Ornithology 607-254-2412 607-342-4594 (cell) k...@cornell.edu<mailto:k...@cornell.edu> On Jun 7, 2012, at 5:57 AM, Bill Evans wrote: There’s a delightful old paper by Gerald Thayer describing "the mid-summer, mid-night, mid-sky gyrations of the Black-billed Cuckoo, as noted by my father and me for three consecutive seasons in the southwestern corner of New Hampshire": ”Several years before we discovered the nocturnal-flight phenomenon, we began to be puzzled by the extreme frequency of Cuckoo calls on summer nights. ***They uttered both the cow-row notes and the rolling guttural call; but the guttural was much the commoner of the two, except on dark, foggy nights, when the case was usually reversed. ***The birds were often so far up as to be only faintly audible when directly overhead, with no obstructions interposed; and this on a still night would seem to mean an elevation of at least a hundred and fifty yards. They sometimes flew lower, however, and on cloudy nights often moved about barely above the tree-tops.” “On the evening of July 11-a pitch-dark evening with a thundershower lowering,-they were remarkably noisy, both sitting in trees and flying high in air. The seated ones, of which I heard only two, made the Cowcow notes, while all the flying ones made the liquid gurgle. I heard this note overhead between thirty and forty times in the course of about three hours, during half of which time I was afoot on the road.” -- Thayer, G. H. 1903. The Mystery of the Black-billed Cuckoo. Bird Lore 5:143-145. In a big nocturnal flight I heard moving up the St. Croix River (MN/WI) in late May of 1985, I estimated a rate of passage of Black-billed Cuckoos in the range of 100 per hour for at least a few hours in the middle of the night. This was not a call total but a rate of vocal birds estimated by following multiple calls from apparently the same individual, and it was clear that these birds were migrants heading northbound. In 1988-1990 I began recording nocturnal flight calls each fall migration period in early July around Ithaca, NY and was surprised that in each season the highest rate of BBCU calling was in July through early August. There seemed to be a lot of variability in the number of calls I recorded between proximal nights, which could be a function of weather/wind and microphone pickup dynamics or that the birds tended to prefer some nights over others. In the big passerine push from mid –August through mid-September across central NY, BBCU flight calls are less common than one might expect. Using a Sennheiser shotgun mic back in those days, my rates of BBCU nocturnal flight call detection in the latter half of August were in the 1-2 per hour range (averaged over whole night). In the first half of September rates dropped to the range of one call every four hours. Whereas in July through early August it was common to record sustained rate through the night of 4-5 per hour. But as I mentioned there was a lot of variability from night to night. I haven’t recorded much in June in central NY, but my impression has been that the breeding ground flight calling, the “mid-summer, mid-night, mid-sky, gyrations”, is a phenomenon that increases in July. Bill E -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
