Clever birds figure out how to trick others into raising their kids A common Cuckoo chick in Reed Wablers nest waits to be fed with its mouth wide open, in this undated file photo. Getty Images — ...

To someone watching birds casually, the cuckoo’s behaviour looks almost lazy. Instead of gathering twigs, lining a nest, and ...

A lot of us will change our wardrobe to fit into a crowd, and the brood parasite known as the cuckoo has used evolution to do the same thing. Because cuckoos lay their eggs in the nest of a host bird, ...

Cuckoos are some of nature’s most practiced—and successful—con artists. Many species from this large family of birds are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and outsource ...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. How do new species arise? And why are there so many of them? One possible ...

Foster families The greater the cost of raising a cuckoo chick, the more likely a host bird is to kick cuckoo eggs out of the nest before they hatch, Australian researchers have found. Brood ...

For the first time, scientists have found a bird species–Australia’s superb fairy-wren–that can spot a murderer. The killers are chicks of a particularly aggressive cuckoo species. The crime begins ...

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 ...

The parents of a childhood friend had a cuckoo clock. I was at her house for a sleepover and didn’t pay it much attention. But that night, I had a nightmare in which the cuckoo was singing and pecking ...