More than 230 years ago, a Swedish naturalist described a variety of cuckoos whose females had different colors – either gray, like the males, or reddish. The naturalist Anders Sparrman, a disciple of Carlos Linnaeus, gave these red-haired females the name “hepatic” females in 1788 and, being so different from the usual gray cuckoos, he even considered that the cuckoos in which they appeared were a species new – the Cuculus hepaticus. The mystery deepened over time when naturalists realized that liver cuckoos were just a colorful variety of the European song cuckoo; and then it became even more complicated when they discovered other species of cuckoos with the same color variation restricted to females. The mystery has now come to an end.
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