DELALANDE’S COUA (Coua delalandei), an extinct species of ground-dwelling cuckoo native to Madagascar. Also known as Delalande’s coucal or the snail-eating coua or famakiakora in Malagasy. At around twenty-two inches long, Delalande’s coua was among the largest of the coucals, a subspecies of cuckoo. Delalande’s coua occupied the humid northeastern region of Madagascar and is the only member of the coua family known to be extinct. It was blue on the back with a white breast, auburn belly, and dark-green-and-blue tail feathers. Like other cuckoos, it had large feet and reversible third toes.
The last reported capture of a Delalande’s coua was in 1834, by the French surgeon and botanist Alphonse Charles Joseph Bernier, who captured exemplars of over two hundred species during an expedition in Madagascar and shipped them back to France for classification. After the French annexed and colonized Madagascar in 1896, the coucal population declined rapidly. Not only were they hunted by the colonizers for their sought-after feathers, but their habitats were also destroyed—by 1925, Madagascar had lost 70 percent of its forest. There are reliable reports of local sightings of Delalande’s coua up until the first two decades of the twentieth century; by the 1920s, however, the bird had likely gone extinct.
It is named for Pierre Antoine Delalande, a French naturalist, taxidermist, explorer, and painter. There are preserved museum specimens of Delalande’s coua all over the world, including in Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Cambridge, and Antananarivo.