Common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) in flight. This is an adult male: Grey morph adult females have a pinkish-buff or buff background to the barring and the sides of the neck, and sometimes small rufous ...

In one of the more notorious dick-moves of the animal kingdom, parasitic cuckoo birds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, forcing them to raise the cuckoo chicks as if they were their own. New ...

For roughly a century, researchers have been trying to figure out how different female cuckoos manage to lay such a variety of different egg colors to match different host birds. Now, a group of ...

Every cuckoo is an adopted child -- raised by foster parents, into whose nest the cuckoo mother smuggled her egg. The cuckoo mother is aided in this subterfuge by her resemblance to a bird of prey.

Cuckoo birds build no nests of their own. Instead, they rely on trickery to raise their young. The female cuckoo lays her eggs in the nest of a host whose eggs are similar in size and color. The host, ...

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 ...

JOHNSTON — The common cuckoo is such a rare sight in this part of the world that it doesn’t show up in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s guide to birds in North America. The Audubon Society’s handbook ...