Cuckoo: A Spectacular Look at a Con Artist's Life

The fact that cuckoos are brood parasites is well known. They use a cunning tactic to avoid caring for and feeding their own young by laying their eggs in the nests of other bird species. All of us have heard the tale. But why do the other parent birds tolerate this? They must be too foolish. Too clumsy? Or merely illiterate? Of course, cuckoo's eggs frequently pass for real. what about the cuckoo chick? Not even close! It swiftly develops into a giant with no resemblance to its new family. So why are the adoptive parents unaware of the hoax?

Even killing the other chicks in the nest is something some cuckoo chicks will do. But most of the time they simply sneak their eggs into the nests of other birds, some of which are smart enough to easily identify this. However, they choose not to discard the egg. The "victims" haven't figured out how to fight back, according to the ornithologists' notion up until lately. It turns out that they might even benefit from having babies from strangers in their nest! So, is the behavior of the cuckoo a miraculous trick or an evolutionary conundrum?