BBC Wildlife Magazine

The Great SPOTTED Pretender

The cuckoo female will spend the spring laying up to 26 eggs in various nests.

It’s a sunny spring day in the Sobarriba, a plateau 950m above sea level in northern Spain, and a warm breeze is carrying a faint smell of wild thyme and lavender, which grow in the hedgerows and meadows of this low-intensity agricultural landscape. For nearly 10 minutes, we have been observing a great spotted cuckoo female perching on a branch of a tall poplar tree, just a couple of meters away from a carrion crow nest that we need to check for new eggs. The crow female is sitting on the nest, in an incubating posture, ignoring the cuckoo, though she must have seen it.

We have never witnessed an active defence by breeding crows against great spotted cuckoos –

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