Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature

By Nick Davies

Beloved as the herald of spring, cuckoos have held a place in our affections for centuries. The oldest song in English celebrates the cuckoo's arrival, telling us that 'Sumer is icumen in'. But for many other birds the cuckoo is a signal of doom, for it is Nature's most notorious cheat. Cuckoos across the world have evolved extraordinary tricks to manipulate other species into raising their young. How do they get away with it?

In this enormously engaging book, naturalist and scientist Nick Davies reveals how cuckoos trick their hosts. Using shrewd detective skills and field experiments, he uncovers an evolutionary arms race, in which hosts evolve better defences against cuckoos and cuckoos, in turn, evolve novel forms of trickery. This is a fascinating corner of Darwin's 'entangled bank', where creatures are continually evolving to keep up with changes in their rivals.

Lively field drawings by James McCallum, and remarkable photographs, show cuckoos in action: from the female cuckoo laying her beautifully disguised egg, to the cuckoo chick ejecting the host's eggs and young from the nest to ensure it gets the full attention of its foster parents.

Cuckoo offers a new insight not only into the secret lives of these extraordinary birds, but also into how cheating evolves and thrives in the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781408856574

Nick Davies

Nick Davies is Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He was born on the Lancashire coast, where night-jars and pink-footed geese inspired his passion for birdwatching from an early age. After a first degree at Cambridge, he did his doctorate at the Edward Grey Institute, Oxford University, studying the territorial behaviour of Pied Wagtails. He then returned to the Zoology Department at Cambridge, where he did his famous work on the variable mating system of the Dunnock. For the past fifteen years he has studied the interactions between the Common Cuckoo and its hosts, and his students have worked on other brood parasites, including cuckoos in Africa, cowbirds in South America, and the Moorhen, a species that parasitises its own kind. His previous books include Dunnock Behaviour and Social Evolution and (with John Kreb) An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and his awards include the Medal of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour and a Cambridge University Teaching Prize.