Cuckoo
Cheating by Nature
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British field ornithologist Davies (Cuckoos, Cowbirds, and other Cheats) dials into the parasitic behavior of Britain's favorite harbinger of spring, the cuckoo, as he details the "evolutionary arms race" between cuckoos and their hosts, which yields adaptations and behavior that seem exquisitely well-tuned, but sometimes incomprehensibly sloppy. He walks readers through Wicken Fen, his fieldwork site for more than 30 years, carefully observing the clever manipulations of cuckoos and their targets: reed warblers, wagtails, meadow pipits, and dunnocks. With meticulously designed experiments, Davies discovered the intricacies of egg mimicry, part of an "egg arms race between cuckoos and hosts." He explains some of the more complex host behaviors within a Darwinian framework, addressing the cost-benefit assessments that host parents must make to determine if they should remove a dubious egg, attack a potentially predatory nest invader that could just be a cuckoo mimic, or feed a hyperstimulated cuckoo chick that is mimicking the sounds of the host brood. Davies's bird story is satisfying not only for his strong conclusions and well-maintained focus, but because it also highlights the value of scientific observation. B&w illus., color insert.
