378 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM vol. loe 



Clamator glandarius (Linnaeus) 



Great-spotted cuckoo 



Three new hosts may be added to those listed m my book, one of 

 whicli is onl}^ a race of a species of which another form was already 

 recorded as a victim of the great-spotted cuckoo. The first of these 

 is the dwarf raven (Corvus corax edilhae), a bird of which Belcher 

 (1949a, p. 37) records a nest found near Gabredarre, Ogaden, Italian 

 Somaliland, containing tliree or four eggs of the great-spotted cuckoo 

 and three or four eggs as well as one young of the host. Previously 

 only the Spanish race of this raven (C. c. hispanus) had been reported 

 as a host of the nominate race of the cuckoo. 



The second is the piapiac (Ptilostomus afer). I have no data on 

 this other than that it is mentioned as a victim of the great-spotted 

 cuckoo by Mackworth-Praed and Grant (1952, p. 505). 



The third new host is the long-tailed glossy starling {Lamprotornis 

 caudatus). Madden (1934, p. 94) saw a fledgling great-spotted cuckoo 

 apparently being fed by a pair of these starlings at El Obeid, Kordo- 

 fan, Sudan, in November 1932. Aside from adding an additional 

 species to the known hosts of this parasite, this record seems to be 

 the first for any hole-nesting bird north of South Africa. As pointed 

 out in my book (Friedmann, 1949a, p. 10), the data then available 

 showed a puzzling divergence in the choice of victims by this cuckoo 

 in South Africa on the one hand, and ever3''where else in its range on 

 the other. In the former area most of the records were of hole-nesting 

 birds (three species of starlings), while all the records from Nyasaland 

 and Southern Khodesia north to the Mediterranean lands were of birds 

 making open nests in trees or on ledges (crows and magpies of several 

 species). It is true that one open-nest builder, the Cape rook, was 

 known to be parasitized in South Africa; now we may further reduce 

 the apparent geographical disparity in host selection wTth this indica- 

 tion of the choice of a hole-nesting victim as far north as the Sudan. 



In my earlier report (Friedmann, 1949a) I considered all the pop- 

 ulations of the great-spotted cuckoo as one taxonomic unit. Since 

 then, Clancey (1951, p. 141) has separated the birds south of the 

 Sahara under the name choragium, restricting the name glandarius 

 to the birds that breed in Spain, Portugal, Mediterranean Africa, 

 Cyprus, Greece, Asia Minor, and Iran and that migrate south in 

 winter to tropical Africa. It follows from this that there again seems 

 to be a regional difference in host selection. The nominate race is 

 known to utilize only open nests, chiefly of corvids of several kinds, 

 whereas the African choragium lays in such nests and in those of 

 hole-nesting starlings as well. 



