A strange voice came to me across an Indiana cornfield: ka-ka-ka- ka-ka-ka kow-kow-kow-kow. “That’s a rain crow,” my grandmother said. “That means it’s gonna rain tonight.”
As a child first hearing the bird and my grandmother’s name for it, I gazed across the field at the woodland expecting a large black bird to appear.
But the rain crow isn’t a big black bird. It’s a yellow-billed cuckoo. And it isn’t a brassy, bold bird of open spaces like a crow. It’s a handsome, retiring bird of the forest.
It was many years before I saw my first rain crow, and many years before I observed that its song does indeed mean it will rain soon … somewhere.
Aside from this undeserved reputation for portending rain, cuckoos get a bad rap. If you were asked, what kind of bird would you like to be, it isn’t likely to be a cuckoo.
An eagle or falcon, perhaps. Majestic, fearless. Or a crane, an elegant symbol of lifelong fidelity. Perhaps a swan, its beauty revered in fairy tales and ballet.
But a cuckoo? Not likely.
Cuckoos are associated with two things: ornate German clocks and lunacy. These associations come from the voice and behavior of Europe’s common cuckoo. The bird in the clock announces the time by popping out and saying “COO-coo” for each of however many hours it is. The sound is patterned after the wild bird’s song.
In real life, the common cuckoo doesn’t care a thing about the time of day. It sings mainly to attract a mate and to announce its possession of a certain territory for breeding.
But it can be rather daft about it. It typically delivers 10 to 20 calls in a row at the rate of about one per second. It has been known to call 300 times without stopping.
The common cuckoo is also renowned as a brood parasite, or a bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests.
Yellow-billed cuckoos and their close relatives, the black-billed cuckoo, are neotropical migrants. They breed in the eastern U.S., but they spend the winter in South America.
Yellow-bills are widespread breeders in North Carolina, while black-bills are uncommon summer residents of the higher elevations of the North Carolina mountains. Tanglewood Park is a good place to listen and look for yellow-bills; the New River area in Ashe County is the best place nearby to look for black-bills. The two species are best distinguished by bill color, tail pattern and song.
A third species, the mangrove cuckoo, is found in Florida and Mexico in North America.
Cuckoos eat tent caterpillars, webworms and cicadas, so they are considered beneficial by many, especially growers of fruit trees. With this year’s hatch of 17-year cicadas, these birds are well-fed.
After this summer’s extreme heat and lack of rain, the earth is parched, the lawn dry and brown.
I sure wish the rain crows would start calling.
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