Mondo Knows Facts
Some birds raise another species' chick
Cuckoo chicks hatch first and push the host's eggs or young out of the nest The female lays in a nest she does not build, and the host pair feeds the intruder as their own. The chick's begging call can mimic a whole brood, which keeps food coming. Host species evolve defences, and cuckoos evolve counter-defences. It sits in Mondo's animals collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: birds, parasitism, nests
Some birds raise another species' chick: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Cuckoo chicks hatch first and push the host's eggs or young out of the nest. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a animals fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Animals shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.