20th April: Cuckoo Day

It's Cuckoo Day so here are 10 things you didn't know about cuckoos:

1. Cuckoos belong to the Family Cuculidae. The roadrunner bird which appears in the cartoons is a type of cuckoo.
2. Cuckoos are famous for laying their eggs in the nests of other birds, but not all species of cuckoo do this. of the 127 species of cuckoo that exist, about 60 are brood parasites.
3. The cuckoos that do this have evolved so that their eggs closely resemble those of their host. Non-parasitic cuckoos lay white eggs. Meanwhile, host species, such as the reed warbler, evolve to be able to tell the difference and eject the cuckoo egg before it hatches. Cuckoo chicks are much larger than their hosts and will push the other chicks out of the nest so it gets all the food.
4. The cuckoo's favourite food is caterpillars, including the big hairy ones other birds dislike.
5. The word cuckoo comes from the call of the male bird. The first reference to a cuckoo in England dates to about 1240 in the poem Sumer Is Icumen In - "Summer has come in / Loudly sing, Cuckoo!"
6. The cuckoo's call is usually in the key of C.
7. The maximum recorded lifespan of a common cuckoo in the United Kingdom is 6 years, 11 months and 2 days.
8. One of the most important distinguishing features of the cuckoo family are the feet, which are zygodactyl, meaning that the two inner toes point forward and the two outer point backward.
9. Throughout the family there is wide variation in size (6 inches to 25 inches) and plumage. Non-parasitic cuckoos have much brighter plumage. Parasitic cuckoos often mimic birds of prey so that they can scare the host birds away for long enough to lay their eggs.
10. In Greek mythology, Zeus transformed himself into a cuckoo so that he could seduce Hera.