The Cocos cuckoo (''Coccyzus ferrugineus'') is a

Vulnerable species A vulnerable species is a species which has been Conservation status, categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as being threatened species, threatened with extinction unless the circumstances that are threatened species, ...

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweigh ...

in the tribe Phaenicophaeini, subfamily Cuculinae of the cuckoo family

Cuculidae Cuckoos are birds in the Cuculidae family, the sole taxon in the order Cuculiformes . The cuckoo family includes the common or European cuckoo, roadrunners, koels, malkohas, couas, coucals and anis. The coucals and anis are sometimes separ ...

. It is

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

Cocos Island Cocos Island ( es, Isla del Coco) is an island in the Pacific Ocean administered by Costa Rica, approximately southwest of the Costa Rican mainland. It constitutes the 11th of the 13 districts of Puntarenas Canton of the Province of Puntarenas ...

, an island in the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

which is part of

Costa Rica Costa Rica (, ; ; literally "Rich Coast"), officially the Republic of Costa Rica ( es, República de Costa Rica), is a country in the Central American region of North America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the no ...

.HBW and BirdLife International (2021) Handbook of the Birds of the World and BirdLife International digital checklist of the birds of the world. Version 6. Available at: http://datazone.birdlife.org/userfiles/file/Species/Taxonomy/HBW-BirdLife_Checklist_v6_Dec21.zip retrieved August 7, 2022

Taxonomy and systematics

The Cocos cuckoo was at one time treated as a subspecies of the

mangrove cuckoo The mangrove cuckoo (''Coccyzus minor'') is a species of cuckoo that is native to the Neotropics. Taxonomy The mangrove cuckoo was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition o ...

(''C. minor''), and the two are now considered

sister species In phylogenetics, a sister group or sister taxon, also called an adelphotaxon, comprises the closest relative(s) of another given unit in an evolutionary tree. Definition The expression is most easily illustrated by a cladogram: Taxon A and t ...

. The

pearly-breasted cuckoo The pearly-breasted cuckoo (''Coccyzus euleri'') is a species of bird in the tribe Phaenicophaeini, subfamily Cuculinae of the cuckoo family Cuculidae.HBW and BirdLife International (2021) Handbook of the Birds of the World and BirdLife Interna ...

(''C. euleri'') and

yellow-billed cuckoo The yellow-billed cuckoo (''Coccyzus americanus'') is a cuckoo. Common folk-names for this bird in the southern United States are rain crow and storm crow. These likely refer to the bird's habit of calling on hot days, often presaging rain or th ...

(''C. americanus'') are also closely related to those two.Tenorio Brenes, J. (2020). Cocos Cuckoo (''Coccyzus ferrugineus''), version 2.0. In Birds of the World (T. S. Schulenberg, S. M. Billerman, and B. K. Keeney, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.coccuc1.02 retrieved September 25, 2022 The Cocos cuckoo is

monotypic In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group (taxon) that contains only one immediately subordinate taxon. A monotypic species is one that does not include subspecies or smaller, infraspecific taxa. In the case of genera, the term "unispec ...

. The Cocos cuckoo's generic name ''coccyzus'' is from the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

''kokkuzo,'' meaning a common cuckoo's cry. The

specific epithet In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

''ferrugineus'' is derived from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

and means "rusty", referring to the color of its upperparts.

Description

The Cocos cuckoo is long, about half of which is the tail, and weighs about . Their bill is stout and somewhat decurved. Its

maxilla The maxilla (plural: ''maxillae'' ) in vertebrates is the upper fixed (not fixed in Neopterygii) bone of the jaw formed from the fusion of two maxillary bones. In humans, the upper jaw includes the hard palate in the front of the mouth. The t ...

is black and its

mandible In anatomy, the mandible, lower jaw or jawbone is the largest, strongest and lowest bone in the human facial skeleton. It forms the lower jaw and holds the lower tooth, teeth in place. The mandible sits beneath the maxilla. It is the only movabl ...

yellow to yellow-orange with a black tip. Males and females have the same plumage. Adults' forehead and crown are slate gray and their upperparts grayish brown. Their wings are rufous. The upper surface of their tail is grayish brown and the undersides black with wide white tips. Their face has a narrow blackish "mask" past the eye, which is surrounded by a narrow ring of yellow to orange yellow bare skin. Their throat and breast are buffy white and the belly and undertail

coverts A covert feather or tectrix on a bird is one of a set of feathers, called coverts (or ''tectrices''), which, as the name implies, cover other feathers. The coverts help to smooth airflow over the wings and tail. Ear coverts The ear coverts are sm ...

rich buff. Juveniles are similar to adults but have less contrast between the head and back colors, a less contrasting facial mask, a whitish throat, chest and belly, and less white on the tail.

Distribution and habitat

The Cocos cuckoo is found only on Cocos Island, which is about miles off Costa Rica's Pacific coast. It inhabits essentially the entire island, using most of the plant communities on it: flooded bay forest,

riparian forest A riparian forest or riparian woodland is a forested or wooded area of land adjacent to a body of water such as a river, stream, pond, lake, marshland, estuary, canal, sink or reservoir. Etymology The term riparian comes from the Latin word '' ...

tropical rainforest Tropical rainforests are rainforests that occur in areas of tropical rainforest climate in which there is no dry season – all months have an average precipitation of at least 60 mm – and may also be referred to as ''lowland equatori ...

, and tropical

cloudforest A cloud forest, also called a water forest, primas forest, or tropical montane cloud forest (TMCF), is a generally tropical or subtropical, evergreen, montane, moist forest characterized by a persistent, frequent or seasonal low-level cloud c ...

. It is found from sea level the highest points on the island at about .

Behavior

Movement

The Cocos cuckoo is a year-round resident throughout the island, but it tends to occur at forest edges during the breeding season and in the forest interior when not breeding.

Locomotion

The Cocos cuckoo usually makes only short flights. It often moves among and within trees by hops along branches and short flutters and glides.

Feeding

The adult Cocos cuckoo feeds primarily on caterpillars, especially those of the giant sphinx moth (''Cocytius antaeus'') and the Orion cecropian butterfly (''Historis odius''). Young are fed crickets and cockroaches. Its foraging technique varies by habitat, including hunting at ground level by short flights, gleaning from understory plants, and probing in ''Guzmania sanguinea''

bromeliad The Bromeliaceae (the bromeliads) are a family of monocot flowering plants of about 80 genera and 3700 known species, native mainly to the tropical Americas, with several species found in the American subtropics and one in tropical west Africa, ...

s on '' Sacoglottis holdridgei'' trees. In addition to caterpillars and other

arthropod Arthropods (, (gen. ποδός)) are invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, a Segmentation (biology), segmented body, and paired jointed appendages. Arthropods form the phylum Arthropoda. They are distinguished by their jointed limbs and Arth ...

s, it also occasionally eats '' Anolis towsendi'', an endemic lizard.

Breeding

The Cocos cuckoo breeds during the dry season of January to mid-April. Both members of a pair build the flimsy stick cup nest with no lining, and usually place it on a smallish branch of a small tree. Two such nests were both about above the ground, and both were partially shielded by leaves. Both sexes share incubation and parental care. The clutch size is not definitely known but is believed to be one or two. The incubation period is not known but is thought to be similar to the nine to 12 days of others of its genus. The time to fledging is also not known.

Vocalization

As of late 2022,

xeno-canto xeno-canto is a citizen science project and Information repository, repository in which volunteers record, upload and annotate recordings of Bird vocalization, birdsong and bird calls. Since it began in 2005, it has collected over 575,000 sound r ...

had no recordings of the Cocos cuckoo's vocalizations and the

Cornell Lab of Ornithology The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a member-supported unit of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, which studies birds and other wildlife. It is housed in the Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity in Sapsucker Woods Sanctuar ...

Macaulay Library The Macaulay Library is the world's largest archive of animal sounds. It includes more than 33 million photographs, 1.2 million audio recordings, and over two hundred thousand videos covering 96 percent of the world's bird species. There are an ever ...

had only three. The song is described as "a guttural ''Eeh-eeh-eeh-eeh-eeh-eeeh-eeeehh''" and is most frequently sung during the breeding season, and then between dawn and noon.

Status

The

IUCN The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN; officially International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natu ...

has assessed the Cocos cuckoo as Vulnerable. It has a very small range. Its estimated population of between 250 and 1000 mature individuals is believed to be stable. Feral cats, pigs, and goats, as well as deer, are potential threats - the first as a predator and the others as damaging to the species' habitat. Disturbance from tourism is also increasing, and climate change is another potential threat.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q1262725 Cocos cuckoo Endemic birds of Costa Rica Cocos cuckoo Taxonomy articles created by Polbot