A Cooee To Drive You Cuckoo

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday October 23, 1996

John Dengate

SUNRISE in the suburbs on a beautiful sunny day. So why aren't I full of joie de vivre? Perhaps it has something to do with being woken by incessant yapping in the backyard - and the fact that it isn't my dog that's doing it.

In fact it's not a dog at all, it's an overgrown, insatiable baby bird with the noisiest "feed me" calls in the business. Moving house is starting to look like a good idea.

The bird is a koel - a large cuckoo which serenades us during the warmer months with its excuse for birdsong.

Life wasn't meant to be easy for koels. In spring, lovesick males fly down from Indonesia and PNG. Each has to wrest a territory from all the other males if he wants to meet the girl of his dreams.

Getting a territory in the bird world means being really obvious, flying around, displaying your bright male colours and yelling at intruders.

The trouble with this, if you're a cuckoo, is that all the other birds want to beat the daylights out of you.

So to find your perfect match you need to advertise yourself, but to avoid being beaten to a pulp, you need to be invisible.

Koels solve this problem by having camouflage colours so they're hard to see, but amazingly raucous voices so they're very easy to hear. In spring, males advertise their wares with a series of deranged cooee calls, each one slightly higher than the last - and of course sound travels well at four in the morning.

Most of this noisy courting is over by December and then we get a break until late January when the baby koels hatch in the nests of wattle birds and other foster parents.

Then you get the next round of koelitis - the incessant yapping in the mornings as monster koel chicks yell breakfast orders to their diminutive foster parents.

But they are soon gone. By May, exhausted koels have gone north for their winter holidays and wattlebirds are chasing insects and sipping nectar in the garden.

I have to confess, I've been a bit of a koel junkie ever since I discovered what an extraordinary life they lead.

Normal birds learn from their parents what to eat, how to hunt, what song to

sing and where the migration routes go.

They also learn who they are. This was graphically shown by German scientist Konrad Lorenz earlier this century as he swam across a lake followed serenely by a bunch of geese he had raised who thought he was their mum.

But if birds learn from their parents, how does a koel know to eat fruit when its foster parents fed it insects? How does a koel know it's a koel when it has been raised by wattlebirds? And how on earth does it know to migrate to Indonesia when its foster parents haven't even been to Port Macquarie?

The answer to these questions is that all this data has to be already programmed into the koel's grape-sized brain - an extraordinary feat.

This also helps explain koels' awful voices - why pre-program a nice musical tune when brain space is limited and a raucous one will do as well. When you think about koels' amazing life story, the idea of such a creature living happily in your garden is rather appealing. Perhaps that interesting yapping sound isn't so bad after all. Perhaps we'll put the moving plans on hold.

© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald

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