Shortly after we found our sliver of property in the North Valley 18 years ago, we began planting more than 100 trees and shrubs on our mostly barren acre. Our primary aim, other than providing some shade for ourselves, was to attract and support birds and other wildlife. To say we’ve succeeded in that aim would be an understatement: To date we’ve seen more than 260 different species of birds in or flying over our yard.
As the trees — cottonwood, mesquite, acacia, hackberry, oak, Arizona ash, pistache, Mexican elder, desert willow, juniper, cypress and pine — have slowly matured, more and more birds have found suitable nesting places. Shrubs and vines, including red barberry, wolfberry, graythorn, New Mexico olive, canyon grape and several kinds of sumac, provide food for these and other birds. Among the breeding birds that have become regulars are black-chinned hummingbird, ladder-backed woodpecker, western kingbird, American robin, northern mockingbird, curve-billed thrasher, phainopepla, summer tanager, black-headed grosbeak, Bullock’s oriole, house finch, and lesser goldfinch.
This spring we added breeding roadrunners to our yard menagerie, with a nest of three inquisitive youngsters visible in a tangle of acacia branches and frequent sightings of a parent snatching up lizards and other prey to take to the nest. But even more special to us is the pair of yellow-billed cuckoos that have taken up residence for the second year in a row.
Though we have guesses as to where their nest might be, we haven’t yet spotted it, but we hear and see one or both birds multiple times daily. Their “song” is much more percussion than melody, a succession of fast, wooden, clucking sounds that spill into several hollow, guttural calls — ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp — that is next to impossible to describe; sometimes they utter a series of soft cooing calls, too. When the birds first appeared in May, we occasionally saw them bathe in our in-ground birdbath, but now that they are busy with nesting activities, they are more secretive and we usually only get quick glimpses of them in flight.
The birds’ diet consists almost entirely of insects, with an occasional elderberry or grape taken during the summer. Hairy caterpillars, cicadas, katydids, grasshoppers, crickets, and beetles feature prominently on the menu, so the birds are largely beneficial. Most of their foraging is along branches within the dense foliage of shrubs and trees, with birds usually only venturing out in the open to move quickly from place to place.
Widespread and fairly common throughout the eastern United States, yellow-billed cuckoos have a patchy and much sparser distribution in the Southwest, where they are considered imperiled due to habitat loss and pesticide use. Largely confined to riparian corridors lined with dense vegetation, they are most often found where there are stands of mature cottonwoods and mesquites. Their nests are typically flimsy platforms of dry twigs, 3 feet to 18 feet above ground and usually well-concealed by foliage.
Typically cuckoos lay two to three eggs, which are incubated by both parents for nine to eleven days. On occasion, cuckoos may lay their eggs in another cuckoo’s nest, and even more rarely in the nest of another bird species, but this is not the norm. Nestlings grow astonishingly fast, from egg to fledgling in just 17 days. The pin feathers burst open so quickly that the naked hatchlings are fully feathered in two hours. Little is known about how long family groups stay together, but eventually they will make their way to wintering grounds in South America.
We feel honored to be hosting these intriguing birds, and are delighted that our habitat improvements have received their seal of approval. If our mini-refuge can attract and sustain a pair of these threatened birds, we have managed to make our little corner of the world a better place.
Marcy Scott is a local birder, botanizer, and author of "Hummingbird Plants of the Southwest." Along with her husband, Jimmy Zabriskie, she operates Robledo Vista Nursery in the North Valley, https://ift.tt/2YEUW9X in native and adapted plants for birds and wildlife habitat. She can be reached at HummingbirdPlantsSW@gmail.com.
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