A common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), a rare migrant in Bangladesh, has been photographed in the shade trees of a tea garden in Sreemangal, Moulvibazar. Biswajit Bhattacharjee Bapon, a divisional senior correspondent for Banglanews24, found the grey bird one autumn morning busy eating an insect. It looked like a cuckoo or hawk-cuckoo at first and could not be identified on the spot.
Wildlife photographer Abu Bakar Siddique suggested it was probably a common cuckoo. Professor Monirul H Khan of the zoology department at Jahangirnagar University then confirmed it: a common cuckoo, once called the Eurasian cuckoo. The bird has no widely used Bengali name; he suggested gayak-kokil, the singing cuckoo, and Bangladesh's wildlife encyclopaedia also lists it as pati-papiya.
According to Professor Khan's Photographic Guide to the Wildlife of Bangladesh, the bird of the family Cuculidae is 33 centimetres long and is an uncommon passage visitor: a migrant that rests for a while in a country between the ones it travels from and to. The Sreemangal bird was stopping over in this way.
The male is grey above and white below, with a pale ash-grey chin, throat and breast, fine black bars on the white belly, flanks and undertail, and a dark brown tail tipped with white. Females come in two forms: one like the male but with a light reddish wash below the grey breast, the other a liver-coloured form with dark bars on a rufous-brown back. Both sexes have yellow legs, feet and eyes.
Professor Khan said the species has been recorded in wooded areas of Chattogram, Khulna and Sylhet divisions. Its range spans Europe, Africa and Asia, including much of India.
The reporter notes that a tea garden is more than a green carpet of bushes under rows of shade trees: with patience, rare birds, flowers and wildlife turn up there, and Sreemangal's shade trees are proving to be a resting place for migrants too.
Photo: Ron Knight / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: Banglanews24
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