TIL: These Birds Trick Others Into Raising Their Gigantic Kids | Today I Learned

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turns out there’s lots of different
birds that don’t build a nests at all
they only lay their eggs in other birds
nests this behavior is called brood
parasitism and a trick is you have to
make an egg that looks like all the
other eggs otherwise the mother bird
will kick that egg out of her nest and
just raise her young but if the egg
looks exactly like all the other eggs
and she doesn’t have any other option
than to raise them all as if they were
her own if you don’t have a nest then
you can invest a lot of your effort into
producing X cow birds for example which
are then one of the most common brood
parasites in the u.s. they can lay an
egg every single day like a chicken and
just put it in nest here and that’s
there they don’t have anything to do
with the raising of their offspring at
all they leave that entirely to the
mother of the nest where they deposited
the egg
the trick with brood parasitism is the
chick of the brood parasite will grow
much faster than that of the chicks of
the actual nest it gets really big and
it’s like adaptation is to like kick
even before it can open as its kicking
and just kicks the other eggs out
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even if the other chicks hatch and
survive it’s way bigger and its mouth is
way bigger and so when mom comes to feed
she sees this giant target mouth of the
brood parasite and all her chicks are
buried underneath but she doesn’t know
which one is which
in fact sometimes the brood parasite
chick is much much bigger than the
actual mama bird so she just thinks she
has kind of a freak for a kid and it
just goes with it I guess
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