If you want to see the yellow-billed cuckoo and other elusive animals, leave tent caterpillars alone. Let forests grow back. Respect all your wild neighbors, and watch life thrive.
The clouds finally came without bluster, a darkening of the western sky that was more deliberate than all the late-afternoon blowhards who’d passed over in recent days while ranting on about nothing. Evening after evening for weeks, the baseless thunder and rambling winds had left us high and dry. As the parched land contracted, my world did too, and I focused only on keeping my growing habitat alive.
But last Wednesday’s teaser was different, at least to me, though apparently not to the tree frogs. Usually the first ones to chime in at the slightest sign of rain, they remained silent. Maybe they, too, were tired of Mother Nature’s false alarms and needless distractions.
Estimating that I had about five minutes before the downpour, I headed out the back door and down the path to ask the green frogs why their diminutive friends were being so skeptical. Just as I reached the pond, a bird of uncertain size and shape flew past me and into a walnut tree. Zooming in with my camera, I saw that his beak and coloring differed from that of anyone I’d seen here before. My poor eyesight poses a challenge, but many of my discoveries come from observing basic divergence from general patterns, and I went inside to report the good news to Will: “I think I saw a new bird by the pond!”
As the skies opened up outside my office window, a quick search of our bird books provided a photo match and a name: My new friend was a yellow-billed cuckoo. Further reading online revealed more interesting aliases: “Common folk names for this bird in the southern United States are rain crow and storm crow,” read an iNaturalist description. “These likely refer to the bird’s habit of calling on hot days, often presaging rain or thunderstorms.”
My first reaction was to cry. I cried with gratefulness for the rain. I cried with joy that I had met a magical “rain crow” heralding the storm’s arrival. I cried with awe as I thought about how much the animals teach me when they fly or crawl or leap into view and upend everything I thought I knew about the world.
Once I’d gotten my bearings, I started wondering how I’d been able to see a yellow-billed cuckoo — a bird universally described as elusive and hard to observe — in my own backyard. Looking through my pond images from the previous week and discovering the cuckoo in more than one of them only deepened the mystery. “No bird is more secretive,” writes naturalist and author George Ellison in The Smoky Mountain News. “Seldom leaving the shrouding foliage, the cuckoo sits motionless. When it does move, the cuckoo creeps about with furtive restraint. Seeing one is possible but unlikely. For the most part, this is a bird that you hear.”
Had I heard yellow-billed cuckoos before but just not known it? I wasn’t sure. But in learning about their habitat needs, I realized why I might be seeing them now. We have everything they need. They like to blend into dense vegetation of deciduous woodlands. They eat primarily caterpillars, devouring as many as 100 tent caterpillars in a single sitting, and they’re happy to add cicadas, katydids, crickets, beetles, ants and spiders to the menu. Elderberries, blackberries and wild grapes—all abundant here—provide some sustenance into the fall as well.
Many birds avoid hairy caterpillars, but the Cornell Lab of Ornithology explains the special mechanism that yellow-billed cuckoos use for safely processing the spines of gypsy moth caterpillars, fall webworms, tussock moth caterpillars, and others: “Those spines end up sticking to the lining of their stomach. To get rid of the spines, they periodically shed the stomach lining, coughing it up in one giant pellet, similar to an owl.”
Having recently watched cuckoo wasps trying to lay their eggs in the nests of organ pipe mud dauber wasps, I was well aware that the term “cuckoo” implied brood parasitism and wondered if the yellow-billeds were partaking in such sneaky activities in our habitat. But Mary Sonis, another North Carolina naturalist, had a gentler explanation of how they earned their name. They do make their own nests, but sometimes they run out of time—like a human mother who goes into labor on the way to the hospital. “When there is a significant caterpillar irruption, the food supply for the Cuckoo has a precipitous upturn, and the female is ready to lay her eggs in very short order,” she writes in the Raleigh News & Observer. “The nest is simply not ready for the early arrivals. Sometimes, the nursery isn’t finished when nature calls.”
But unlike cowbirds, who lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and then skedaddle, cuckoos stick around, Sonis writes, often helping to feed both their own young and the chicks of the host bird’s nest: “What perfect guests!” When incubating their own nests, cuckoo parents share sitting duties equally during the day, and dads take over for the night.
It hasn’t been difficult to create habitat for these hard-working birds. Where once there was turfgrass, we’ve let a mini-forest grow; it’s now filled with sassafras, walnuts, tulip poplars, staghorn sumacs, hackberries, clearweed, ferns, asters, goldenrods, violets, rushes, sedges, nimblewill, boneset, Indian tobacco, black-eyed Susans, white vervain, and many other natives—some of which we planted and most of which we didn’t. I was delighted to learn that yellow-billed cuckoos also like water; as small as our new pond is — at 8 feet in diameter — it seems to suit the cuckoo just fine.
Perhaps most helpful of all to our bird friends, we let the insects be, and that includes the tent caterpillars and the fall webworms. If we have gypsy moth caterpillars, I don’t even know it, but I would leave those too—not just for their own sake but for the cuckoos and anyone else who needs a little refuge from the food-desert lawnscapes that surround us. No one is a “pest” here; if anything, the only pests in the neighborhood are those on two legs constantly wielding gas-powered chainsaws and riding around on giant mowers like they’re at the Indy 500.
Because we welcome everyone, including the animals many gardeners squish or drown or spray or trap, life is ever evolving and diversifying. Species listed as rare, uncommon, or threatened elsewhere — from American bumblebees to meadow fritillaries — have found refuge for the very reason that we don’t arbitrarily decide which plants and animals get to stay and go based on random aesthetic values or cultural notions of who is “good” and who is “bad.” Though my encounter with the prescient rain crow felt like a magical experience, his presence was likely no coincidence —and was rooted in our desire to help everyone in our habitat put down roots, enjoy the view, and stay a while.
Further Reading
“The Forlorn Calls of the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo” by George Ellison, Smoky Mountain News
Overview of Yellow-Billed Cuckoo, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Yellow-Billed Cuckoo Identification, Bird Watcher’s Digest
“When the Rain Crow Calls” by Jill Henderson, Show Me Oz
“Secretive and Versatile” by Kate St. John, Outside My Window
(Photos/video: Nancy Lawson/HumaneGardener.com)
You always bring me hope and a continued attempt to try. May you feel blessed. And thank you.
Thank you so much, Holly – I’m so glad these words help. <3
Beautiful and inspiring while encouraging hope for the future. Thank you so much!!!!
Hi Elaine! Thank you! <3
Leaving it all—what a radical concept! Congratulations on the visit, it is like a blessing by Mother Nature.
I’ve been photographing ruby-red aphids on my cup-plants and observing ladybug larvae instead of trying to kill them (in a prior lifetime I used to do that…not for many years now).
Question—do you extend this practice to fungi such as cedar quince rust? It is all over two beloved old hawthorns (Crataegus) in back of my garden. The tubules that release the orange spores like fairy dust cover the abundant fruit (little apples). Bluejays and Cardinals eat and flap about raising clouds that coat everything below with orange spore-dust, and no doubt sprinkle down upon the firepit seating-area just over the fence of my neighbors (who happened to spray “for mosquitoes” in May thus wiping out all my pollinators for 6+ weeks). This spring the hawthorns were glorious in full white-flowered bloom. All “experts” found online focus on the “disease” of cedar-quince rust and how to get rid of it, which involves multiple sprays or injection of systemic toxins or…in a “severe case” one is advised to cut the tree down and plant something else. These two trees with their lateral, arching, sheltering, criss-crossing branches are dear to me and to the wrens that nest in them. What benefit to creatures might there be to leaving this orange fungal dusting alone? It happens every year. From the house it looks like autumn color but the leaves “should” be green. Am I a bad neighbor not to remove these trees? Please advise!
Hi Martha,
Thank you! Definitely a blessing. And that’s neat about the cup plant aphids and ladybugs; I’ll have to check out my cup plant! Every year they both hang out on the oxeye sunflowers.
Yes, I do leave the things like the fungus you’re talking about alone. We have a bit of the cedar apple rust on our Eastern red cedars, and I know my neighbors took Eastern red cedars down because of their cedar apple rust — because they didn’t want it to hurt their serviceberries. But both those plants are valuable for wildlife, and the Eastern red cedars especially so in this area, since they provide not just food but also much needed cover.
I don’t know as much about cedar quince rust, but from what little I’m reading I see that people say it can be more “pernicious” than cedar apple rust and more “damaging.” But it’s a native fungus, and your hawthorns are old, so it’s just doing what fungi do — which is often to move in and help start breaking down the wood, right? I think when you talk about all the birds who still go to the hawthorns, it kind of answers your question right there — because these plants will be valuable to wildlife for years to come. Not only are they still good nesting sites, but also the beetles and other insects will start to move into the wood. It’s amazing to me that even the dead wood of very thin-trunked, young sumacs (a little grove died from leaning too far over and trying to get light) still supports lots of woodpeckers and other birds who come to inspect for snacks.
So I think you are a good neighbor, especially to your wild friends! I’m sorry about the spraying by your human neighbors; that’s so awful.
If your hawthorns survive, great. But if they decline, there’s still so much life they could support if you leave them in place. Maybe you could grow some native vines over them if there is any concern about neighbors seeing dead wood.
Thanks for supporting my keeping the two hawthorns! I am sitting near them in the back of the garden reading the last pages of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and suspect she would agree!
I suspect you’re right! 🙂 I thought the picture you sent me was so beautiful!
Your suggestion about vines reminds me of Dutchman’s Pipe (pipevine) which I have always loved (Eloise Butler had it growing on her “office” (work cabin) in her Wild Botanic Garden in Minneapolis…but it might kill the hawthorn trees entirely if it covered them as that plant seems to do.
Please delete first post, sorry for duplicate! Second one is edited.
A great addition to your habitat! I have seen them at Magee Marsh, off the boardwalk in Ohio, and when riding the rail trails, the latter perched in a tree gobbling down tent caterpillars! Any new visitor, no matter how transient, is memorable. This spring I had a waterthrush inspect the up and down of my spring and rill, a short visit, perhaps a stop on a longer journey.
Neat! I had not heard of a waterthrush but just looked him up. What a cutie! The fall webworms are just starting their activity on one of our trees, so I’ll have to sit and watch to see if our little cuckoo friend visits!
Thank you for your newsletter. It always makes me feel so less alone in The Land of Neat & Tidy.
The “pests” are the ones on 2 legs, totally!🤣
Thanks so much reading, Brenda! It makes me feel less alone to connect with you too. <3
Thank you for such a bright and joyful message!
We’re seeing encouraging results here — even though our “landscape and habitat transformation efforts” began only 5 months ago — the number and variety of creatures we see seems to be increasing every day!
Hi Debbie! It’s amazing how quickly it happens! You guys must be loving it!! <3
Your writing and pictures just keep getting better. And now I have a reason to leave tent caterpillars alone. Maybe the Japanese beetles too.
Thanks so much for your news letter.
Hi Curt – thank you! 🙂 Yes, and the webworms too! I’m hoping to catch him in action at the webworm nests that are just starting to form.
what about poison ivy? It keeps me from walking the property.
Hi Sharon! You are right – that’s an exception in places where you need to walk or work. I leave poison ivy where I can because it has such high wildlife value and is a great plant. But if I left it everywhere, I wouldn’t be able to walk or plant or take care of things either.
Do you have Virginia creeper as well? Often they are growing together and mistaken for each other — but Va creeper is definitely OK to leave (for most people; occasionally someone is allergic to it, but it’s not like poison ivy in that regard).
I only have a very tiny garden but it is teaming in wildlife — gardeners’ foes as well as all the very desirables. like you I leave everything. I had my pokeweed decimated — eaten back to the leaf skeletons and stems — by army worms. I let them be. Wrens and cardinals feasted and eventually the poke weed grew new leaves and flowered and fruited normally>
I don;t at the moment have tent caterpillars but I see them in wild areas near my home. I will certainly let them be if I do get them in my trees that are all [except one crape myrtle] natives.
Thanks for your continued inspiration for and validation of my approach gardening!
Thank you for this post. Very thought-provoking and I agree with the basic approach.