The term comes from the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. See Easter Egg. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction requires permission.

2010). These and other cuckoo hosts appear to have evolved a simple rule of thumb to direct their behavior: "eject the egg unlike your own". But how does a bird know what its own eggs look like?

Sometimes, a common cuckoo female will target certain hosts whose eggs appear similar to her own. This increases the chances of the host bird not rejecting the cuckoo’s eggs or abandoning the nest.

Birds need to recognize a cuckoo egg dumped in their own nest and either throw out the strange egg or desert the nest to start afresh. In Japan, the common cuckoo recently switched to a new ...

The collection of wild birds' eggs is now only permitted with a licence and the historical specimens already ... Tree Pipits have evolved remarkably high variation in egg colour and pattern as a ...

When the cuckoo chick hatches, it ejects other eggs or hatchlings to get all the ... who’s an avid wildlife photographer, observed the birds’ behavior in 2014 in Amsterdam, where she lives.

THE swallows and the cuckoos will soon be with us again. When we listen in a spiritual mood, these birds are emblematic of a ...

Recently, staff at the Xinfengjiang Forestry Administration of Guangdong Province recorded the first sighting of the rare Emerald Cuckoo ... these birds have been nesting and laying eggs in ...

Brood parasitic birds lay their eggs in the nests of others, sparing themselves the expense of rearing their own young. The resulting coevolutionary arms race includes sophisticated defenses by ...