Thick-billed cuckoo

The thick-billed cuckoo lives in humid (humid), sub-humid, and gallery forests from Guinea in the northwest to Mozambique in the southeast, but it does not have vast territories in the Congo Basin ^{[4] [5]} . Previously, it was found in tropical forests in the north-east of Madagascar, but it has not been noted on this island since 1922 ^[6] . In the southern part of its range, the thick-billed cuckoo is a partially migratory bird and spends the dry season of the southern hemisphere in East Africa ^[7] .

In terms of behavior, this is a typical cuckoo. It feeds on hairy caterpillars, but can also have significant preference for grasshoppers and praying mantises ^[8] . The thick-billed cuckoo is a specialized nesting parasite of forest shrikes ^[5] . It parasitizes almost exclusively on several species of this genus - on the red- faced spectacled shrike ( P. scopifrons ) in the eastern part of the range and on the red-bellied spectacled shrike ( Prionops caniceps ) in West Africa . In the well-studied case of the red-billed spectacled shrike, the thick-billed cuckoo caused perhaps the most significant decrease in nesting success among all nesting parasites; some spectacled shrikes failed to feed their own chicks for five years with ten attempts at breeding ^[5] , with an average infection percentage of 35 up to 55% of nests. The extinct subspecies of Madagascar, almost certainly, parasitized on the wangs ^[6] , which are related to the magpie. The parasitism of this species on spectacled shrikes can be compared with the parasitism of a similarly sized black cuckoo , which throws eggs exclusively into the nests of shrub shrikes .