I recently researched the behaviour of the common cuckoo, a bird which is well known in our culture as something ‘mischievous’ and ‘deceptive’. The more I looked into this parasitic creature, the more I realized just how brutal its breeding strategy is.
The mother cuckoo patiently scopes out a suitable host nest. It chooses a host species who eggs are a similar colour to its own. When the host parents are away the cuckoo swoops in, rolls an egg out of the nest and lays its own. If the cuckoo is seen the host species may detect its egg and destroy it.
If not the cuckoo chick is the first to hatch in the nest. From the moment it is born, it is driven by instinct to roll an egg onto its back and out of the nest. The cuckoo chick’s back is flat and well suited to this task and its strength is greater than its ‘siblings’. One by one, it pushes the eggs out. If a host chick hatches the cuckoo chick will wrestle them onto its back and hurl them out of the nest. Anything evicted from the nest will die on impact with the forest floor or will be grievously injured and die from exposure. The cuckoo chick will then have the attention of both host parents, who mistake it for one (or more) of their own.
This parasitic strategy disturbs me for a number of reasons.
The host chicks have almost no chance of survival once a cuckoo egg is in their nest. Their only hope is that the cuckoo chick accidentally hurls itself out of the nest.
The ‘killer instinct’ of the cuckoo chick is disturbing to see. From the moment it hatches it attacks its ‘siblings’. The host chicks have no way to comprehend what is going on.
It the host parent returns and the cuckoo is rolling out its eggs or wrestling its chicks, the parent does not intervene. I found it traumatizing to see that, so close to their guardian, the host chicks were killed one after another by their ‘sibling’. The host chicks were hurled from their place of safety with no chance of an intervention.
The cuckoo chick is the master of deception, attracting the parents to its massive red beak with song and movement. It ‘greedily’ demands their attention, even if the other chicks are still alive. The host parents expend their energy on their own demise, whilst instinctively doing what they ‘feel’ is the best thing to do.
The final tragedy is that the host parents feed the massive cuckoo fledgling up to obscene proportions – far larger than themselves. They continue feeding it even after it leaves the nest. They expend their ‘hope’ and energy on a parasitic, oversized intruder. By not recognizing their folly, they ensure that another generation of cuckoos will grow to kill the chicks of their species. Every cuckoo you see reach maturity means three or four host chicks killed in their nest.
Until the host species evolve greater intelligence, they will be preyed upon by the ‘insidious’ cuckoo. They have many opportunities to detect an intruder – firstly, an egg many times larger than their own. Secondly, a chick many times larger than their own, rolling eggs and chicks out of the nest. Lastly, once the cuckoo chick begins to grow massive and visibly different from themselves, the host parents have the opportunity to abandon it to starvation.
We often think of nature as a source of healing and beauty, filled with wonderful creatures. This is certainly part of the truth. But we highly evolved humans, in our ‘technological paradises’ must never be detached from the sheer, innovative, amoral brutality of species in the wild. The cuckoo – in my opinion – is the epitome of this ‘mindless evil’. From the moment it hatches its life is one of violence against the helpless and parasitism upon the helpful.
It is not my place as a human to make ‘moral statements’ about the struggle for survival. But I certainly am entitled to feel what I feel – an instinctive revulsion at the intruder and its destructive enterprise.