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That Giant, Fiendish Cuckoo
The adult’s bill is so massive that early ornithologists thought it was a type of toucan or hornbill. Its cry is so eerily frightful, in Queensland it’s known as the harbinger of a storm. When one flies overhead, nearby birds will rise into the air to launch a communal attack against the red-eyed fiend.
Yet all these unusual features pale into the ordinary when its nasty habit of parasitism is revealed. The Channel-billed Cuckoo, weighing in at 1 kilo, is the largest of Australia’s avian parasites and the largest cuckoo in the world. Channel-bills substitute their chicks into the nest of any bird large enough to feed their monstrous young, like magpies, currawongs and ravens. In my neighbourhood on the outskirts of Sydney, the Pied Currawong is the unlucky victim. After two months of incessant, noisy badgering, the so-called “chick” has grown to a mammoth half metre in length and dwarfs its bedraggled wreck of a Currawong parent.
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