Sean Dooley

Generally, the bulk of them start arriving late September and sort of the peak when they're arriving and calling.

That name Coel is onomatopoeic and it's the origin of the Kui cry.

When the first British settlers came, they heard the local, presumably the Eora people, use that call as a contact call inspired by the koel.

The thing was that Indigenous groups, say in Victoria or South Australia, would never use that call because the koel was unknown south of really the Sydney, Illawarra region.

When I was a kid, there was a co-op turned up in the Melbourne suburb of Sandringham in 1986.

And I went chasing after it because it was only the sixth ever record in Victoria.

And I dipped out on it.

So, and I had to wait another 13 years before I was able to find another one in Victoria.

Well, heard about another one by the Yarra River in Fairfield.

So that was actually 14 years.

It was 2000.

And there'd been a few more records since then, but not that many.

Since 2000, well, to put it this way, I wrote an article about cuckoos in Victoria in last spring's Australian Bird Life magazine.

And I went through all the records I could find.

And just in the spring of 2024, I

there were, according to my estimates, there were at least 116 individual koels in Victoria for that spring, which is something like six and a half times more koel records than there were for the entire 20th century.

So these birds have expanded their range and their migration and now they're quite a familiar sound and they've even reached Adelaide.

There's at least two or three birds that get to Adelaide every year.

And we're now starting to see evidence of breeding as well.

So it's not just the males that are overshooting their migration.