Western Koel

The Asian koel is a large, long-tailed cuckoo of the Indian subcontinent, China and Southeast Asia, 39 to 46cm long and weighing 190 to 327g. Like many of its relatives it is a brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of crows and other hosts, which raise the young. Unusually among cuckoos, adults are largely fruit-eaters. The name is an imitation of its call (Wikipedia, general species account).

Males may distract the hosts so that the female gets a chance to lay an egg in the nest, and a female may remove a host egg before laying. It belongs to a superspecies with the black-billed and Pacific koels, which are sometimes treated as subspecies. It features widely in Indian, Pakistani and Nepali poetry.