Bawling babies are the bane of many long-suffering parents. But consider the lot of a pair of birds that spends weeks building a nest, and preparing to raise a brood of their own, only to be hoodwinked into caring instead for a gluttonous interloper. That is the fate of victims of the common cuckoo, Cuculus canorus. Cuckoos are brood parasites: rather than building nests of their own, they lay their eggs in the nests of other species, relying on the unwitting foster parents to incubate the egg and feed the hatch-ling until it is fully fledged. But why do the hosts put up with it? Therein lies a sinister and unlikely tale, as told by Nicholas Davies and colleagues in Proceedings of the Royal Society.
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