Cuckoos

First-Time Migration in Juvenile Common Cuckoos Documented by Satellite Tracking

Being an obligate parasite, juvenile common cuckoos Cuculus canorus are thought to reach their African wintering grounds from Palearctic breeding grounds without guidance from experienced conspecifics but this has not been documented. We used satellite tracking to study naïve migrating common cuckoos. Juvenile cuckoos left breeding sites in Finland moving slowly and less consistently directed t...

Rarely Parasitized and Unparasitized Species Mob and Alarm Call to Cuckoos: Implications For Sparrowhawk Mimicry By Brood Parasitic Cuckoos

—Recent experiments support the longstanding hypothesis that Common Cuckoos (Cuculus canorus) are mimics of Eurasian Sparrowhawks (Accipiter nisus). Additional experiments further suggest that mimicry benefits the cuckoos by reducing the intensity of mobbing they suffer near host nests, at least in some host populations, potentially increasing their access to the hosts’ nests. We observed two s...

Learned recognition of brood parasitic cuckoos in the superb fairy-wren Malurus cyaneus

Cuckoo hosts defend themselves against parasitism by means of mobbing, egg rejection, and chick rejection. However, each of these defenses is prone to costly recognition errors, and hosts are therefore more likely to deploy these defenses if they observe a cuckoo in the vicinity of their nest. The success of such response plasticity depends on accurate recognition of sympatric cuckoo species, b...

Brood Parasitism in Asian Cuckoos: Different Aspects of Interactions between Cuckoos and their Hosts in Bangladesh

Invasive prey impacts the abundance and distribution of native predators.

While an extensive literature exists on the negative effects of invasive species, little is known about their facilitative effects on native species, particularly the role of invasives as trophic subsidies to native predators. The invasive gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) undergoes periodic outbreaks during which it represents a super-abundant food source for predators capable of consuming it, par...

Does coevolution promote species richness in parasitic cuckoos?

Why some lineages have diversified into larger numbers of species than others is a fundamental but still relatively poorly understood aspect of the evolutionary process. Coevolution has been recognized as a potentially important engine of speciation, but has rarely been tested in a comparative framework. We use a comparative approach based on a complete phylogeny of all living cuckoos to test w...