One Flew Over The Falcon Nest Carcass Of Rare Cuckoo Found In Nest Of Peregrine Falcon

Washington state bird watchers rarely see the yellow-billed cuckoo, whose population is dwindling in the West. In the latest sighting, a falcon saw it first.

The bird was dead, its carcass spotted in the nest of one of the city’s downtown peregrine falcons.

The remains turned up in a photograph of the falcon’s nest on the Washington Mutual Tower.

The photo was taken in June by Whidbey Island bird artist Bart Rulon, and his conviction that the remains were those of a cuckoo was recently confirmed by ornithologist Dennis Paulson.

Yellow-billed cuckoos are common in the East, but declining in the West, said Paulson, director of the Slater Museum of Natural History at the University of Puget Sound.

“They did breed in Washington back at the turn of the century, but they just abruptly disappeared from much of their northern range in the early 1900s,” he said. It’s not clear why.

Sighting of the bird in Washington are rare. Paulson said he doesn’t believe there have been more than five or six recorded sightings in the past 20 years.

When sightings are so infrequent, all must be documented and submitted to the Washington Bird Records committee, an eight-member group of experts.

The committee, affiliated with the Washington Ornithological Society, meets twice a year to rule on whether to accept such sightings.

Rulon’s cuckoo “sighting” will be submitted at the committee’s April meeting, Paulson said. He predicted it will be accepted.

There are about 9,000 known bird species in the world, 435 of which have been seen at least once in Washington.

About 350 of those are seen regularly.

Paulson logged Rulon’s sighting on the Tweeters birding mailing list on the Internet. That prompted a discussion about cuckoos’ decline in the West and peregrines’ preference for them, which some attributed to the two species’ active night lives.

“I think it’s more likely because cuckoos fly above the canopy (of trees), and they’re not very good fliers,” Paulson said.

Peregrines also favor Northern flickers, a type of woodpecker, probably for the same reason, he said. Cuckoos and flickers are of similar size, Paulson noted.

In California, the cuckoos are declining because of the loss of their preferred habitat of deciduous forests along rivers, said Brian Bell, a Woodinville environmental planner and secretary of the Washington Ornithological Society. He participated in a study of the birds at a sanctuary near Sacramento in the late 1980s.

Many of Washington’s river bottoms are still filled with cottonwoods, Paulson said - yet there are no cuckoos to be found there. There seems to be no shortage of the larvae, worms and caterpillars that cuckoos like to eat, he said.

The birds, which have large territories, are shy, still and quiet, Paulson said.