Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature

About the Book

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.

About the Author :
Nick Davies is Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. His cuckoo research has been presented on BBC 4 Radio, and as a BBC film, produced by Mike Birkhead and narrated by David Attenborough. His previous books include Cuckoos, Cowbirds and other Cheats that won Best Book of the Year from the British Trust for Ornithology and British Birds Magazine.

Review :
This amazing detective story by one of the country’s greatest field naturalists is also a fascinating study that solves many of the puzzles surrounding this most extraordinary bird A new book tells in mesmerising detail how the host birds are first outwitted by the female cuckoo, and then by the cuckoo chick ... A riveting account not only of how the cuckoo evolves deceptive stratagems, such as eggs which mimic the eggs of the host, but also of how the host birds evolve defences, such as learning to reject any eggs which seems slightly different from their own. This is in effect an “evolutionary arms race” and its complexities are elucidated with exemplary clarity and humour by Professor Davies … An even more fascinating take on curious behaviour ... It’s a terrific read Beguiling … The tale features astonishing insights into the processes of both evolution and scientific research, and it beguiles because of Davies’ plain, personable style and his relating of his own experiments … the reader is taken nest-hunting, fake-egg planting and landscape-gazing. Rich, tactile description is lightly burnished with the poetic while illustrations by watercolourist James McCallum complete a package that will suit both dedicated twitcher and armchair naturalist alike, and gives springtime’s feathered friend and fiend a fair hearing at last Fascinating piece of natural-history detective work ... Davies is a hugely knowledgeable and readable guide, whose reasoning is often fascinating … This is a fine and involving book, whose insights – wrung from decades of hard graft and constant questioning – make you wonder again at nature’s extraordinary ingenuity The character of the writer barely intrudes and the real subject, picked apart in meticulous detail, is nature itself. In the hands of a scholar who is also a first-rate story teller, you realise just how entertaining such a work can be. Nick Davies’s Cuckoo is a model of that genre – part gripping detective story, part evocation of place and season, but also a glorious reminder of the sheer wonder of our planet and all its strange life forms. Yet it is hard to imagine a more fascinating theme … If we were less concerned with tooth rot and more devoted to life on planet Earth this would surely be a better place. Certainly it seems a more extraordinary and filled with wonder after reading Davies’s outstanding book’ This book is living proof that careful observation, allied to an enquiring mind, can achieve ground-breaking results … This is science of the highest order; but more importantly still, it has been rendered into clear, readable prose, which non-scientists such as myself can easily understand. Beautiful illustrations by the Norfolk artist James McCallum add to the book’s appeal … Davies’s enthusiasm is utterly infectious … His prose ranks among the best nature writing, fuelled by a lifetime’s passion for this place and one compelling species of bird Learning about cuckoos from him is like being taken on an old-fashioned nature ramble with a particularly well-informed uncle … In fact it’s more like a gripping detective story in which there isn’t just a single body but multiple corpses … Davies’s book is positively chirruping with fascinating information like this … Nature writing is currently having a bit of a moment. There are murmurs, though, that the overly poetic style that some writers are adopting is getting in the way of actual facts. Refreshingly, this isn’t the case with Davies. Although he gives us some lovely descriptions of the Fens, which is where he mostly does his field work, he is aware that his primary task is to tell us things rather than show off. Consequently, he uses words to explain and enlighten rather than to embellish. The result is a fascinating book, even if, in its own way, it has all the qualities of a particularly horrible nightmare Charming … Reveals how Wicken’s reed warblers are locked in an evolutionary arms race in The Fens with the female cuckoo Skilfully, he has combined science and anecdote to piece together the lifecycle of the common cuckoo, which, at this time of year, is about to return from Africa. We can only admire the patience and fastidious fieldcraft with which he has compiled such a thorough assessment of one of Nature’s most notorious fraudsters Davies underpins calm and elegant prose with deep knowledge gleaned from years studying the species. By the end of the book, it is hard not to feel the same joy as Davies does when contemplating this remarkable bird, or the same sadness at its apparent UK decline Fascinating … A fine and involving book, whose insights make you wonder again at nature’s extraordinary ingenuity