Most birds spend hours, days, or even weeks painstakingly building their nests. Some birds make nests out of mud, some build nests in trees, and some birds nest on the ground and simply scrape out a ...

If their eggs are accepted by the nesting bird, then the cuckoo finch does not need to expend the energy required to hatch an egg or care for the young. [Related: Songbirds near the equator really ...

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.

Green eggs and scam: Cuckoo finch's long con may be up. For two million years African cuckoo finches have been tricking other birds into raising their young by mimicking the colour of their eggs ...

In some birds, such as cuckoo finches, this egg coloration trait is passed from mothers to daughters: Female cuckoo finches mimic the eggs that their mother mimicked.

Roughly 40% of cuckoo bird species are “brood parasites.” Instead of building its own nest, the cuckoo infiltrates the roosts of other birds and hides its egg among those of the host.

Cuckoos – which lay their eggs in nests of other birds – have higher speciation rates when they lay their eggs in a broader range of host bird species’ nests, a new study reports.

Egg ‘signatures’ will allow drongos to identify cuckoo ‘forgeries’ almost every time, study finds. African cuckoos may have met their match with the fork-tailed drongo, which scientists ...

Cuckoo bird eggs (center circle) are disguised to look like eggs laid by tawny-flanked prinia birds (outer circle). Login. Subscribe. News; Magazines. An Interactive Experience. Current Issue. April 1 ...