Family:
The yellow-billed cuckoo is a large, slim bird with a long, slender tail, a flat head, and a hunchbacked appearance. It has brown upperparts with rust patches on the wing, and white underparts. The tail is black with large white spots underneath. The head is brown with a yellow eye-ring, and the yellow and black bill which is almost as large as the head is thick and curves slightly downwards.
Like the black-billed cuckoo, it is sometimes known as the ‘rain-crow’ or ‘storm-crown’, because, according to folklore, it starts to call just before rain begins to fall.
Yellow-billed cuckoos usually lay their eggs in their own nests although will sometimes practise brood parasitism when their food supply is abundant, laying them in the nests of other yellow-billed cuckoos or occasionally other species of birds. They have one of the shortest nesting cycles of any bird species with the the start of egg-laying to fledging taking just 17 days.
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Yellow-billed cuckoos forage in dense trees and shrubs and eat mainly tent caterpillars and other insects such as beetles, grasshoppers, and cicadas, but will also take lizards, eggs, and berries.
Yellow-billed cuckoos breed from southern Canada to Mexico and the Caribbean in deciduous forests, open woodland, and towns. They migrate for the winter to Central America as far as northern Argentina.
