Long-tailed Shrike Photographed Raising a Cuckoo Chick in Bandhavgarh

June 3, 2026

Long-tailed Shrike at Dadri Wetlands, India

Research · Reproduction & development

A long-tailed shrike (Lanius schach tricolor) was photographed feeding a cuckoo chick in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh, India. Ramsajeewan Baiga, Gyanendra Prajapati and Kedar Gore reported the observation in a 2026 note in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, presenting it as the first photographic record involving this black-headed form of the long-tailed shrike.

The cuckoo chick was first seen on an exposed root of a banyan tree in Tala village on 1 July 2025. From 2 to 4 July, a shrike repeatedly brought insects to the chick, which appeared considerably larger than its foster parent and frequently called for food. The observers saw only one shrike feeding it at any given time. They identified the chick as Cuculus sp., without assigning it to a particular cuckoo species. The observation is relevant to brood parasitism, in which a cuckoo leaves another bird to incubate and raise its young, but the observers did not witness egg laying or establish which cuckoo species was involved.

Two L. s. tricolor had used a nest in the same tree during May and June, but the observers could not confirm whether the bird sitting there was incubating eggs because the nest was about 20–25 feet above the ground. The cuckoo chick could not be located after 4 July, although shrikes remained in the area throughout the month.

Sources and image credit

Image: Koshy Koshy / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped to 16:9. Long-tailed shrike at Dadri Wetlands, India, 21 January 2012. Representative grey-headed form (erythronotus), not the black-headed tricolor bird in the study. · https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ · Source