Does a cuckoo know it's a cuckoo? The answer is more difficult than you might think, explains Richard Pallardy ...

Brood parasites are some of the bird kingdom’s most notorious sneaks. They don’t rear their own young but instead pawn the task of child care off onto other species without their knowledge. Instead of ...

Parenting can be lots of work for a bird: all that flying back and forth transporting grubs and insects to a nest of demanding young. But some birds manage to forgo caring for their chicks — while ...

Daurian redstarts move closer to humans to protect their nests from brood parasitism. Daurian redstarts move their nesting sites closer to or even inside human settlements when cuckoos are around. In ...

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 ...

Some cuckoos are born assassins. Within a day or two of hatching, the infant birds—still blind, pink, and featherless—will start to evict the other residents of their nest, hurling them over the edge ...

Daurian redstarts move their nesting sites closer to or even inside human settlements when cuckoos are around. In doing so, they actively protect their nest against brood parasitism, as cuckoos avoid ...