The Cuckoo-headed Honey Buzzard is a bird of the Accipitridae family and the genus Honey Buzzard. It is a medium-sized bird of prey, about 0.6 meters long, with dark brown feathers on its back. The face has small and dense feathers that look like scales. Honey Buzzards often live in sparse pine forests and often move around in rural fields and grasslands. Honey Buzzards dig up beehives and devour bee eggs, bee larvae and even adult bees with stingers. The dense feathers on their faces, like scales, act like helmets, making it difficult for bee colonies to do anything about them.
This species often moves its habitat with the bee colonies in summer. In winter, they return to warmer areas. Honey Buzzards not only eat bees, but also small animals such as katydids, stink bugs, mice, frogs and snakes. They are distributed in Europe and western Asia, from Spain, France, southeast England, Scandinavia, the Caucasus region of Russia to Siberia; in winter, they enter southern Sahara Africa.
The Cuckoo-headed Honey Buzzard is a migratory bird with a strong visual memory of geographical features (mountains, rivers, etc.) and magnetic orientation. This species is able to accurately locate the direction of flight and avoid large areas of water that interfere with the migration route when soaring at high altitudes. Therefore, the Cuckoo-headed Honey Buzzard can cross the narrowest areas, such as the Strait of Gibraltar, the Bosphorus, or fly over Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. The Honey Buzzard is considered to be adapted to a wider range of habitats, but generally prefers exotic woodlands and plantations.
Mainly feed on wasps, hornets, bees and other bees, and also eat other insects and insect larvae, and occasionally eat small snakes, lizards, frogs, small mammals, rodents, birds, bird eggs and young birds and other animal food. Usually hunt in flight, and can chase small birds such as finches. Most of them forage on trees in the forest or on the ground, often using their claws to dig honeycombs on the ground, just like chickens digging for food, pecking at various foods in the honeycomb, eating with relish.