Hi, friends.  The word of the day is “echoic,” which is a synonym of onomatopoeic, which means the word sounds like the thing it is describing.  Our bird this week is the Asian koel, whose name is echoic, it is named after the sound it makes.  It has a similar name across several languages, which is neat.  Everyone agreed to name this bird after its call.  It is a member of cuckoo order of birds, which I was going to make a header about until I learned it is an entire order as opposed to a single species.   

I picked this bird because it is a brood parasite, a kind of animal that has come up a few times recently.  This means that the Asian koel will lay its egg in the nest of another bird and “trick” that bird into raising its young.  The evolutionary advantages of a strategy like this are pretty clear, the koel doesn’t need to expend any energy feeding, sheltering or protecting its children.   I am going to excerpt from Wikipedia for a description of how the koel’s brood parasitism works. This all struck me as something between a tense, high stakes heist and ridiculous mistaken identity farce: 

“Males may distract the hosts so that the female gets a chance to lay an egg in the nest.^[33][34] More often however, the female visits the nest of the host alone.^[16] The koel is not known to lay eggs in an empty host nest and a study in Pakistan found that the first koel eggs were laid, on average, within one and half days of the laying of the host’s first egg.^[35] The chicks of the koel hatched about 3 days ahead of the host chicks.^[36] Koels usually lay only an egg or two in a single nest but as many as seven to eleven eggs have been reported from some host nests.^[37][38][39] A female may remove a host egg before laying. Eggs hatch in 12 to 14 days. The young koel does not always push out eggs or evict the host chicks, and initially calls like a crow. The young fledge in 20 to 28 days.^[16] Unlike some other cuckoos, the young do not attempt to kill the host chicks, a trait that is shared with the channel-billed cuckoos which are also largely frugivorous as adults.^[40] It has been suggested^{[by whom?]} that koels, like some other brood parasites do not evict the host chicks due presumably due to the higher cost of evicting nestmates. A small parasite may not be able to evict large host eggs or chicks from a deep Corvid nest without risking starvation and possibly accidental self-eviction.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that despite all of this drama involved in having another bird raise its young, the Asian koel mother does occasionally return to feed her chick, literally returning to the scene of the crime to crime a bit more. The koel is mentioned in the Vedas, 4000 year old writings on Hinduism among other things.  There is it referred to as “that which was raised by others” (or “sown for others to reap”), considered the earliest known references to brood parasitism.  Juveniles and females have a spotted pattern I quite liked, mature males are iridescent black and blue.  For anyone who missed it last week, here is a repost from PBS on how iridescence and the color blue specifically, work in nature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g246c6Bv58.

Have a good weekend, everyone, and keep an eye out for unfamiliar eggs in your nest.

Links: http://tinyurl.com/y6bd9ycw, http://tinyurl.com/ycxpt4hd, http://tinyurl.com/3kw24ecx