Mar 26, 2017

"It wasn't me"

I’ve always maintained that the more time one gets to spend in the wilds the luckier one gets with regards photo opportunities. I would also guess the old adage of 'being in the right place at the right time' relies heavily upon this theory?

Being the lucky fella that I am I was very fortunate to get to spend quite a bit of time working for Wilderness Safaris at Duma Tau Camp in northern Botswana and on one particular morning I heard some persistent young bird calls just outside the office; calling enough to warrant investigation of course (any excuse to get away from admin and into the field) which I duly did.

Outside I found a young Jacobin’s Cuckoo being fussed over by a Black-capped Bulbul. The Bulbul is a common target species for these particular brood parasites and while the male distracts the Bulbul couple away from their nest the female quietly slips in to add an extra egg to the clutch. The young cuckoo usually beats the host species to hatching, subsequently grows quicker and generally dominates the feeding to the extent that the host young do not survive.

This cuckoo looked to me like it had already been out of the nest a while, still wasn’t ready to feed itself and certainly wasn’t shy in its announcement of exactly that. The Bulbul was rummaging about in the leaf litter and flitting in amongst the lower branches of a Large Fever Berry tree in search of grubs ‘n bugs to feed the 'not-so-little' one.

The photo sequence below shows how on one particular occasion the hapless Bulbul brought back something that wasn’t quite to the taste of the youngster and as such was duly rejected.

"Here we go." "Okay, you've got it now."