Chris Hill writes:

>Cuckoos must have a special vulnerability to hunting falcons. Funny since
>they seem such skulkers.

And at 11:35 PM -0800 12/12/1997, Michael Price wrote:

>I'd be wondering how they're getting those cuckoos because, brother, I can
>tell you from experience gained in an eastern boyhood that cuckoos are such
>good skulkers that after seeing Black-billed and Yellow-billed lifers no one
>in his or here right mind bothers to get visuals on them from then on, any
>more than Western birders bother tracking down every singing Swainson's or
>Varied Thrush or booming Blue Grouse. So the 'grine's gotta be popping them
>either in migration or at some migration chokepoint where the cuckoos are
>crossing water and/or are between covering trees or shrubbery. So why don't
>local birders see them there in larger numbers? Because they may be night
>migrants.

I've wondered, too, whether the behavior that makes them hard to see from
the ground might make them perhaps more vulnerable from the air. Most of
the cuckoos I've located visually in Illinois and Minnesota (either
species) have been up in the canopy, often out near the ends of branches,
sitting quietly. Because of all the intervening foliage they either have
to give themselves away by moving or vocalizing (which they stop doing as
soon as they are aware of people nearby), or you have to get just the right
angle if you ever hope to see one. Otherwise you'll walk right by them,
unaware. But maybe a cuckoo is actually rather conspicuous up there in the
treetops, for a sharp-eyed aerial predator such as a Peregrine.

Hal Opperman
Medina, WA