Family:
The black-billed cuckoo is a slender bird with a very long tail. When perched it has a hunchbacked look. It has plain brown upperparts with some rust on the wings, a white breast, and a grey-brown tail with white tips. The head is brown with a red ring around the eye, and the dark grey bill curves slightly downwards. Males and females look the same.
It is a secretive bird, tending to stay hidden in dense foliage, perching motionless in trees and shrubs.
Like the yellow-billed cuckoo, it is sometimes known as the ‘rain-crow’, because, according to folklore, it starts to call just before rain begins to fall.
Black-billed cuckoos usually lay their eggs in their own nests, but will occasionally practise brood parasitism, either laying their eggs in the nests of other black-billed cuckoos or sometimes other species of birds.
Try our interactive bird identifier
Black-billed cuckoos eat mainly insects, in particular tent caterpillars, but also moths, snails, eggs, and berries. They kill caterpillars by beating them against a branch to remove the indigestible hairs. Any remaining hairs are accumulated in the stomach and disgorged along with the stomach lining as a pellet.
Black-billed cuckoos breed across North America east of the Rocky Mountains and are found around the edges of forests and wetlands with trees, as well as more open habitats such as parks and farmland. They migrate south to their wintering grounds of South America where they inhabit tropical rainforests, woodlands, and scrub forests.
