Nestlings of brood parasites exhibit more intensive begging than offspring of their hosts to gain sufficient amount of food or competitive advantage over host nestlings. This begging behaviour should ...

Discover birds that lay eggs in other nests, a survival tactic known as nest parasitism. Learn about common brood parasite ...

Using multiple logistic regression analysis, we investigated the influence of nest site characteristics, laying date and nest size in marsh warblers Acrocephalus palustris on the risk of parasitism by ...

The common cuckoo deploys a wide range of tricks to deceive smaller birds into raising cuckoo chicks instead of their own progeny. This is a form of parasitism: The brood parasite hijacks the parental ...

Reed warblers live with the threat that a cuckoo bird will infiltrate their nest, remove one of their eggs, and replace it with the cuckoo's own. This 'parasitism' enables the cuckoo to have its young ...

Reed warblers use mobbing as a front line of nest defense against parasitic cuckoos, according to a new report published online on January 29th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Cuckoos ...

Cuckoos are nest parasites. That means they lay eggs in the nests of other birds, which then put the effort into raising the chicks. So you'd think they'd be quiet about it. Yet female cuckoos have a ...

There is an azure blue egg hidden in a hanging basket of ferns on our front porch. It belongs to a female house finch that just about caromed off my forehead last week when I tipped a watering can ...

This story appears in the January 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine. For the care and feeding of its offspring, the common cuckoo outsources. When she’s ready to lay an egg, a female Cuculus ...