ML141500961

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Observation details

Mega-rarity discovered by Marcello Gomez and Kyle Matera on 8 Feb 2019 and -- equally importantly -- correctly identified by Larry Manfredi shortly afterward. I heard about the cuckoo from Don Fraser around noon yesterday, when I was coincidentally in Sarasota for an inventory job; Val and I quickly organized, aborted our planned weekend trip to the Tallahassee/St. Marks area, and headed to Delray Beach straight from work. We missed the cuckoo yesterday by 80+ minutes, so we stayed overnight (paying $180 for a motel room for less than 9 hours) and arrived at the park before dawn. It was an anxious 2 hours before the cuckoo was finally spotted, perched low in a Brazilian Pepper bush. It remained in the bush, mostly stationary, until it disappeared about 20 minutes later. As far as identification, I can only follow field guides and the opinions of others with prior direct experience with Dark-billed Cuckoo. The cuckoo was noticeably small, perhaps the size of (or even slightly smaller than) a Northern Mockingbird. The cuckoo was perched low (no more than 2.5 feet above ground) in a Brazilian Pepper bush. Other than looking side to side or making slight hops up into the bush, I never saw the cuckoo move; Val and others saw it drop out of the bush a short distance. We heard no vocalizations. The bird was an obvious _Coccyzus_ cuckoo, with brown upperparts, a long tail, and a short bill with a strongly decurved culmen. The crown was dark with sooty lores forming a wide, indistinct sooty eye line, a complete yellow orbital ring, wholly black bill, and buffy underparts shading to whitish auriculars. Because the cuckoo was perched perpendicular to us (and facing slightly away), we never saw the underparts well. The irides were blackish; the legs and feet are not visible in our photographs. The _combination_ of the short, wholly black bill, yellow orbital ring, and buffy underparts seems to rule out Florida's three regularly-occurring cuckoos, excepting juvenile Black-billed Cuckoo, which appears quite similar to Dark-billed Cuckoo if the undertail pattern is not seen. Photographs of the Palm Beach County cuckoo by others -- e.g., https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S52493351 -- clearly show the bold black and white undertail pattern, which matches Dark-billed Cuckoo rather than Black-billed Cuckoo. I noticed from Val's and my photographs that many of the feathers on the mantle are subtly pale-tipped, which may suggest a juvenile. I will leave the issue of provenance to members of the three records committees that will vote on the record, as I am happily retired from such committees. eBird allows me to count the bird regardless, of course -- and I have not kept an "ABA-legal" bird list since the mid-1980s. But for what it's worth, the cuckoo displayed no behaviors or showed any plumage pattern that would suggest recent captivity, and I would vote to consider it a natural vagrant rather than an escapee. It seems near-miraculous that the cuckoo was found at all, since the area it is inhabiting is far from scenic (in fact, it's pretty damn ugly, with mountain bike trails bisecting an area of highly disturbed habitats grown primarily to invasive exotics, especially Brazilian Pepper and Australian-Pine).

Technical information

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