How do young cuckoos get together?

My question seems to have taken on a linguistic and taxonomic life that I didn’t expect, but regarding the original query I don’t think either of the suggested explanations apply here.  The two cuckoos I photographed were clearly independent since they were feeding themselves and there were no adult hosts present.  Also as mentioned and you can see from the images they were immature, maybe even juvenile.  I doubt they were up to the pairing-up stage.  It was partly this lack of an obvious explanation that prompted the question (and partly the fact that cuckoos are normally fairly solitary yet I’ve seen groups of young cuckoos twice now), so I'll now rephrase my question to "Isn’t it interesting that 'teenage' (young independent) cuckoos travel in groups?". 

 

As for Horsfield’s I plead guilty to the extra ‘e’ but usually subscribe to the minority (but growing) school that doesn’t put apostrophes into compound proper names!  I reckon they are superfluous since the compound name has an independent identity, it doesn't need internal grammatical explanations, and it often looks odd.  If this is intolerable, purists will really hate what I do with acronyms even more -- apostrophes for plural acronyms on the grounds of pronounciation and intelligibility e.g. "I saw three BFCS's yesterday".  

 

And yes I left out the hyphen in Bronze-cuckoo.  But this reminds me, to stir the pot a little, I don’t think anyone has yet wasted a single word on whether you capitalise the post-hyphen word or not.  Both have been written in this discussion, but is it Bronze-cuckoo or Bronze-Cuckoo?  If the latter, why do we have Gang-gang, Fairy-wren and Cuckoo-shrike?  What is the difference that dictates post-hyphen capital in Cuckoo-Dove but not Cuckoo-shrike?  Does any of this matter? Is it 2009 yet?

 

Cheers

 

Julian

On Thu 25/12/08 11:24 AM , "Philip Veerman"  sent:

"How do young cuckoos get together" raises two issues. Are you asking about whilst young and still dependent on their foster parents? My answer to that is - if they do so at all (regularly), I'd suggest just random by seeing potential suppliers of food passing by and latching onto them to get an extra feed. Or maybe they recognise the calls of other baby cuckoos and are attracted to them.

 

If you are referring to when they are no longer babies but ready to breed. The answer is obvious: through an instinctive recognition. The reason is also obvious and that is to breed. To know what instinct feels like you would need to be the bird. But I reckon I would be attracted to a suitable female human without (or in this case in spite of) being raised with a sister.

 

Lastly and sorry but it has come up again, one other point and Julian is far from the only one to get this wrong. (Sean Dooley has admitted to me that to his great embarrassment, he got it wrong in his big twitch book.) It is Horsfield's, NOT Horsefields. Named in honour of Mr Horsfield (no e in the middle and being possessive of just one Mr Horsfield, it needs the apostrophe). Also for what it is worth, a hyphen in there too, to indicate that "Bronze-Cuckoo" is a group name (otherwise for example "Little Bronze Cuckoo" could mean it is a cuckoo with a little bit of bronze on it).

 

Philip