A large mystery bird was lurking in the bottlebrush tree out front, and a pair of much smaller little wattlebirds were fluttering around it.It turned out to be a juvenile koel. The koel, the adult male of which is a sleek jet black colour, is a type of cuckoo, that flies in every spring from New Guinea and Indonesia, to wake us early in the morning. "Ko-el" it calls, noisily and at length.
Our youngster had been raised by the poor wattlebirds, its mother having laid an egg in their nest. On hatching, the little darling had despatched its step-siblings and set about making its foster parents' lives a nightmare of foraging and feeding.It was still there at 4am the next morning. "Tweet tweet tweet" was all it could manage, but it still managed to wake me up. It moved on later in the day.
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