Common Hawk-Cuckoo

The common hawk-cuckoo, popularly the brainfever bird, is a pigeon-sized cuckoo about 34cm long, ashy grey above and whitish below with brown cross-barring, a broadly barred tail and a distinctive yellow eye-ring. The sexes are alike, though males tend to be larger. It closely resembles the shikra, even in its flap-and-glide flight, and small birds and squirrels may raise the alarm as if it were a hawk. The large hawk-cuckoo is similar but has dark streaks on the throat and breast (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is a brood parasite that lays its eggs mainly in babblers' nests. In summer, before the monsoon, males give loud, repeated three-note calls rendered as brain-fever, rising to a crescendo and ending abruptly, sometimes through the day and well into the night. It is arboreal and rarely comes to the ground. SoIB 2023 treats it as endemic to the Indian subcontinent, resident in India with local movements, finds a current increase of about 4% a year, and rates it a Low conservation priority (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).