Elusive migrants? What am I talking about? The Lesser Cuckoo is one bird that is considered a passage migrant where I live. It passes through every year as it makes it way down to its wintering grounds in Sri Lanka. Some of my friends have been able to see it on a couple of occasions over the years. But not me, even after trying in the locations where it had been sighted. Well, this changed last year 🙂 .

It was a late on a Sunday night in November 2022 that I saw a message in a WhatsApp group of my birding friends. It was about the sighting of a Lesser Cuckoo at a nearby lake. I was all excited; here was a bird that I had tried several times to see in the past years and one had finally decided to show up at a lake really close to my home! I decided to try to see the bird the next day morning.

The next day morning at the lake I saw that many birders had come to catch a glimpse of the bird. However it had not yet been spotted. We walked around the wooded patch trying to look for it. Here are a couple of other birds that put on a show for us in the meantime:

Grey-headed Swamphen
Black-headed Cuckooshrike (M)

And finally, after around an hour into the birding session, the Lesser Cuckoo showed itself. And I was elated! Here are a couple of photos from that day:

The next weekend brought news that a Fork-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo had been sighted at the same lake. This was a bird that I had only heard before. I had one calling away in the wooded patch right behind my home a year or so ago. So a chance to see one was enticing.

The following morning I was back at the lake; this time to look for the Drongo-Cuckoo. It took a while for it to make an appearance. But when it did, it stayed around for a while. We even saw it catch a caterpillar. Here are some photos that I took of it:

And what bird shows up when we were observing the Drongo-Cuckoo? The Lesser Cuckoo! Well, it seems the bird decided to hang around for another week! Here are some more photos I got of it in the second sighting:

Videos

Here is a video of the Lesser Cuckoo with clips that I took of the bird.

Here is a video of the Fork-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo that I put together:

Do you also have some bird that you missed many times? Tell me about it through comments to this post.