On this Wikipedia cuckoo rice cooker language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This article is about a kind of bird. The cuckoos are generally medium-sized slender birds.
Most species live in trees, though a sizeable minority are ground-dwelling. The cuckoos feed on insects, insect larvae and a variety of other animals, as well as fruit. Cuckoos have played a role in human culture for thousands of years, appearing in Greek mythology as sacred to the goddess Hera. The chestnut-breasted malkoha is typical of the Phaenicophaeinae in having brightly coloured skin around the eye. The subfamily Cuculinae are the brood-parasitic cuckoos of the Old World. The feathers of the cuckoos are generally soft, and often become waterlogged in heavy rain. Cuckoos often sun themselves after rain, and the anis hold their wings open in the manner of a vulture or cormorant while drying.
There is considerable variation in the plumage exhibited by the family. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. The cuckoos have a cosmopolitan distribution, ranging across all the world’s continents except Antarctica.
Cuculinae is the most widespread subfamily of cuckoos, and is distributed across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania. Amongst the Phaenicophaeinae cuckoos the malkohas and Asian ground-cuckoos are restricted to southern Asia, the couas are endemic to Madagascar and the yellowbill widespread across Africa. Cuckoos occur in a wide variety of habitats. The majority of species occur in forests and woodland, principally in the evergreen rainforests of the tropics. Most species of cuckoo are sedentary, but some undertake regular seasonal migrations and others undertake partial migrations over part of their range.
Species breeding at higher latitudes migrate to warmer climates during the winter due to food availability. The long-tailed koel, which breeds in New Zealand, flies to its wintering grounds in Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, a feat described as “perhaps the most remarkable overwater migration of any land bird. This is the same as the situation in the Neotropics, where no species have this migration pattern, or tropical Asia, where a single species does. In some species the migration is diurnal, as in the channel-billed cuckoo, or nocturnal, as in the yellow-billed cuckoo. The greater roadrunner is rarely seen flying.
The cuckoos are for the most part solitary birds that seldom occur in pairs or groups. The biggest exception to this are the anis of the Americas, which have evolved cooperative breeding and other social behaviours. Most cuckoos are insectivorous, and in particular are specialised in eating larger insects and caterpillars, including noxious hairy types avoided by other birds. They are unusual among birds in processing their prey prior to swallowing, rubbing it back and forth on hard objects such as branches and then crushing it with special bony plates in the back of the mouth. The parasitic cuckoos are generally not recorded as participating in mixed-species feeding flocks, although some studies in eastern Australia found several species participated in the non-breeding season, but were mobbed and unable to do so in the breeding season.
Several koels, couas, and the channel-billed cuckoo feed mainly on fruit, but they are not exclusively frugivores. The cuckoos are an extremely diverse group of birds with regards to breeding systems. The majority of species are monogamous, but there are exceptions. The anis and the guira cuckoo lay their eggs in communal nests, which is built by all members of the group. Most of these species nest in trees or bushes, but the coucals lay their eggs in nests on the ground or in low shrubs.