© 2008 Wild Owl Web
site design & photography © Ian McGuire
Like fishermen, wildlife photographers often have ‘red letter days’. It was in 2003,
when I had just an experience, where I was able to capture images of a feeding session
between two completely different species of bird, a meadow pipit and a cuckoo.
I was on a 2-week photography trip to mainland Scotland and the the Isle of Mull,
on my annual pilgrimage in search of short-eared owls, hen harriers and golden eagles.
I was whilst I was heading for the Mull ferry terminal on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula,
western Scotland, that I noticed a large falcon-like bird sat on a fence. There began
the story of the cuckoo chick and it’s meadow pipit foster parent.
Each spring adult cuckoos travel from Africa to the UK to breed. They are a parasitic species, pestering small birds like meadow pipit, reed warblers, dunnock and robin, and eventually laying their egg in the host’s nest. Female cuckoo may visit up to 50 nests of host species and lay up to 25 single eggs in many of them.
When the cuckoo chick hatches, it instinctively pushes all the host bird’s eggs and any hatched fledglings out of the nest, so that it is the only chick left to be fed -the parents know no different, and continue to feed it as their own - my cuckoo chick is nearly fully fledged.
Despite it’s size, the chick in my story is still relying on food from it’s meadow pipit foster parent. This image shows the chick begging for food and close inspection can see a crane fly in the beak of the meadow pipit.
The meadow pipit’s has no idea that all the time and effort she is putting in to raising ‘her chick’ is only helping the cuckoo species, not her own.
You can imagine how much work has gone into finding enough food to feed this monstrosity!
When the cuckoo chick eventually fledges completely, it will fly back to the same area of Africa that it’s parents came from - it has never met them, so how does it know where to go?
Isn’t nature amazing!!
