Hyetornis pluvialis
Silhouette: Nicolas Huet le Jeune and Jean-Gabriel Prêtre (vectorized by T. Michael Keesey) · PhyloPic
In 3 days ~80% in a week >90%
The chestnut-bellied cuckoo (Coccyzus pluvialis) is a species of bird in the tribe Phaenicophaeini, subfamily Cuculinae of the cuckoo family Cuculidae. It is endemic to Jamaica. The chestnut-bellied cuckoo was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other cuckoos in the genus Cuculus and coined the binomial name Cuculus pluvialis. Gmelin based his account on those of earlier authors include that of the Irish physician, naturalist and collector Hans Sloane. Between 1687 and 1689 Sloane lived in Jamaica. In the account of his stay, which was not published until 1725, he described the chestnut-bellied cuckoo under the names "Old-Man" and "Raine-bird" and explained that "It makes a noise generally before rain, whence it had its name of Rain Bird". The chestnut-bellied cuckoo is now placed with 12 other species in the genus Coccyzus that was introduced in 1816 by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot. The genus name is from the Ancient Greek kokkuzō meaning "to cry cuckoo". The specific epithet pluvialis is Latin meaning... Wikipedia →
| # | Park | Country | Daily sighting probability |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park | 🇯🇲 Jamaica |
More parks will be added in future updates.
Likely
About 40% of wildlife watchers report a Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo sighting in Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park on a given day, based on 409 verified sightings from GBIF citizen-science data from 2019 to 2026. It is the 29th most-seen of the 91 birds we can rate there. Over three days the chance rises to about 80%, and over a week to over 90%, if each day is a fresh chance.
February–April and December
In those months about 50% of wildlife watchers report a Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo in Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park on a given day, against about 30% in January, May and August–September, the lowest months. June has too few records to rate.
Between 6 and 9 am
Across all the parks we cover, that three-hour window holds the most Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo sightings with a recorded time, and about 9 in 10 of them come between 6 am and 6 pm: it is a daytime animal.
Only Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park, in our data
Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park is the only park on Wallace's Line with enough records to rate Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo sightings: about 40% of wildlife watchers there report one on a given day.
Same family: Cuculidae
The closest relatives of the Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo that you can see in Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park (family Cuculidae, Cuckoos) are Jamaican Lizard-Cuckoo (about 40%) and Smooth-billed Ani (about 10%), with each one's daily chance of a sighting.
GBIF citizen-science records
It is estimated from how often the Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo is recorded against all the birds logged in Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park (409 verified sightings from 2019 to 2026), calibrated against known sighting rates. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10% because citizen-science data supports honest approximations, not decimals, and months with records from fewer than five people show "—". How it works.
