BLACK-BILLED CUCKOO (Coccyzus erythrophthalmus) Cuckoo family
Called also: RAIN CROW
Length -- 11 to 12 inches. About one-fifth larger than the robin.
Male -- Grayish brown above, with bronze tint in feathers.
Underneath grayish white; bill, which is long as head and
black, arched and acute. Skin about the eye bright red. Tail
long, and with spots on tips of quills that are small and
inconspicuous.
Female -- Has obscure dusky bars on the tail.
Range -- Labrador to Panama; westward to Rocky Mountains.
Migration -- May. September. Summer resident.
"O cuckoo! shalt I call thee bird?
Or but a wandering voice?"
From the tangled shrubbery on the hillside back of Dove Cottage, Keswick,
where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy listened for the coming of this
"darling of the spring"; in the willows overhanging Shakespeare's Avon; from
the favorite haunts of Chaucer and Spenser, where
"Runneth meade and springeth blede,"
we hear the cuckoo calling; but how many on this side of the Atlantic are
familiar with its American counterpart? Here, too, the cuckoo delights in
running water and damp, cloudy weather like that of an English spring; it
haunts the willows by our river-sides, where as yet no "immortal bard" arises
to give it fame.
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