Banded Ground Cuckoo: Second Generation

In the past few weeks the Cuckoo observation was quite difficult from time to time. The Cuckoos were still around, but the problem actually were the ants. There were too many army ants around (!). At a time we had three different Eciton burchelli colonies, not to speak of the random Labidus praedator swarms which the Cuckoos sometimes also attend. Great for the Cuckoos, as they did not have to walk far to find an active ant swarm. But bad for us and the visitors as the Cuckoos could be anywhere and not all the ant bivouac spots were easily accessible. And so some visitors were lucky while others weren’t.

This afternoon Wilo and Christian went down into the forest to verify the bivouac spot of one of the two army ant colonies present in the reserve right now. Nearby they found a shy Cuckoo individual perching several meters away on a branch. Wilo took some (blurry) photos, but at least they were good enough to confirm what we were suspecting in the last weeks: we’ve got a new juvenile individual, so the pair of Cuckoos recently must have bred in our reserve!

This blog post was written by Nicole