Figure 1: Comparisons of Horsfield's bronze-cuckoo and fairy-wren eggs. Figure 2: Kaplan–Meier estimate of the survival functions of Horsfield's bronze-cuckoo chicks, shining bronze-cuckoo ...

Subspecies of the little bronze-cuckoo and the shining bronze-cuckoo track the appearance of their host's chicks across their geographic range. Credit: Naomi Langmore, Hee-Jin Noh, Rose Thorogood ...

If chicks of each host species have a distinct appearance, and hosts reject odd-looking nestlings, then the cuckoo species diverges into separate genetic lineages, each mimicking the chicks of its ...

In others, the cuckoo chicks eject the hosts’ babies from the nests. This deception can be costly for the hosts who spend their time and energy raising another bird’s babies.

NPR's Vikki Valentine reports Australian researchers have long wondered how one sort of cuckoo bird fools other birds into raising their young. Now, they're onto the cuckoo chicks' guise -- a ...

Cuckoo finch and host chicks. Brood parasitism is costly for hosts because a cuckoo finch chick begs for food very vigorously as soon as it hatches, outcompeting the host parents’ own chicks ...

It’s not all bad for crow chicks who have to share their nest with an uninvited pushy guest such as a cuckoo youngster. For one, they can sit back and wait for food to arrive while the cuckoo ...

Lessons from a cuckoo on why we want what we want, and why our desires can't be trusted.

This parasitic cuckoo bird shows cheaters don’t always get ahead. Anis that slip extra eggs into other nests end up with as many surviving chicks as honest anis.

For the first time, researchers have found a bird species—Australia's superb fairy-wren—that reacts when all its own chicks disappear and a giant imposter takes their place.