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Oriental Cuckoos are large cuckoos. They have a grey head, throat, chest and mantle. The belly, vent and undertail coverts are boldly barred dark-grey on white. The wings are dark-grey, with near-black flight feathers. The undertail is mostly dark-grey, with some white edge lining. The eyes are surrounded by yellow eye-rings. Males always grey. Grey-morphology females have a rufous-tinged foreneck. Some females can have an hepatic (rufous) morphology, with a chest scalloped in shades of rufous-brown, and the head and back, including the wings, in shades of brown and dark-brown. All Oriental Cuckoos have yellowish irises, a black bill with a yellow lower base and orange legs and feet (the legs and feet may be paler, more yellowish, in hepatic females). The wings have the narrow white leading edge on the shoulders typical of many cuckoo species.

The overall distribution of this species can be assessed, and specific locations where birds have been spotted can be found, based on individual sighting reports submitted by birdwatchers to ebird.org .

The global distribution of the Oriental Cuckoo is available HERE .

Oriental Cuckoos breed in northern Eurasia, mostly eastward of Saint Petersburg, in northern Kazakhstan and Mongolia and also in northern China, Korea and in Japan. Their winter quarters are not well-known, but include Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea, western Micronesia, the Solomon Islands and Australia. Only some vagrants reach New Zealand.

Oriental Cuckoos are found in Europe only as breeding migrants to the European part of Russia, mostly the Ural mountain range. There are only individual sighting reports from westward of the Urals, one of which in Russia, the other in southern Finland.

During the breeding season Oriental Cuckoos spend most of their time in taiga and scrubby forest.

We have not seen an Oriental Cuckoo in Europe yet, but the species has been found in Australia.