Articles about 'cuckoos'

Disco Tony has travelled over 5,000 miles. He is grey with a yellow ring around his eyes. He is a cuckoo, but not just any cuckoo. He is one of a very special group of birds whose every move is being monitored.

Professor Nick Davies, who gives this week’s Darwin Lecture, has been studying reed warblers for more than 30 years – and has unlocked many of the secrets of their interactions with the cuckoo. His work shines light on the evolutionary games played out in nature as species compete with environmental pressures, with other species, and with the opposite sex, to pass on their genes.

A study of reed warbler behaviour reveals for the first time that in assessing the risks posed by cuckoos the birds combine information from multiple sources. An ‘information highway’ provides one set of clues and personal encounters another. Only when both add up, do the birds take defensive action.

First time ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ mimicry has been seen in birds. Host birds have evolved a general counter-strategy in which they defend against all birds with the mimicked plumage - cuckoos and harmless species alike.

Using new ‘pattern recognition algorithm,’ latest research highlights how birds are ‘fighting back’ against the parasitic Common Cuckoo in what scientists describe as an evolutionary ‘arms race’. They found that birds with the most sophisticated and distinctive egg patterning are those most intensely targeted by the cuckoo’s egg mimicry.

Evolutionary trick allows cuckoos to mimic the plumage of birds of prey, and may be used to scare mothers from their nests so that cuckoos can lay their eggs. Mimicry in cuckoos may be more much more widespread than previously thought.

New research reveals how biological arms races between cuckoos and host birds can escalate into a competition between the host evolving new, unique egg patterns (or ‘signatures’) and the parasite new forgeries.

Using field experiments in Africa and a new computer model that gives them a bird's eye view of the world, Cambridge scientists have discovered how a bird decides whether or not a cuckoo has laid an egg in its nest.