Crazy Cuckoo Show continues

Wow. The last two weeks have even been crazier…

Due to the advertising by several bird guides who came to see the cuckoo, we had a lot more visitors at the station and most of them were able to see the Cuckoo pretty close. I had started to feed it and it seemed to like it. One day we coincidently found a snake and we fed it to the cuckoo. Renato got great photos and even a video of that (see below). So Wilo and I went out each night to collect katydids and grasshoppers for our new pet! On several days the Cuckoo showed up around 7.30 am in the morning and we did our Crazy Cuckoo show: Nicole feeding the Banded Ground-Cuckoo only a meter in front of the visitors. Last sunday Pancho Sornoza from the Jocotoco-Foundation visited and he filmed a lot of it. You can find the videos on YouTube. We even had people coming from the US and Costa Rica only to see the Cuckoo!!

Then on Tuesday the Cuckoo didn´t show up, but on Wednesday and Thursday morning we found it next to the army ants which were swarming again next to the station. Friday and Saturday we didn´t see the Cuckoo and the ants were gone, too. As I could hear other antbirds further down in the forest I suspected that the ants had moved and so the Cuckoo. Saturday morning we went into the forest and found the army ants bivouac, about 35 meters away from the station. Today Wilo and I went into the forest again. The bivouac had moved but we found the army ants swarm next to a forest trail. And our little friend was right there foraging. I called it and could feed it about 30 minutes.

This blog post was written by Nicole