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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

> I may be wrong but I simply cannot image that a bird with the inate intelligence of this currawong would let itself be a surrogate for raising a cuckoo's young.

I imagine birds raise cuckoos not because they think they are their offspring, but because of some instinctive imperative like we mammals have for raising any kind of puppy.

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if memory serves in many cases ( because there are a lot of parasite birds ) it's an evolutionary thing to prevent the parasite layer from destroying their own eggs - many of the parasite species will check on the nest after the fact and destroy it / the eggs if their eggs have been removed

OK, presumably 'parasite' birds instinctively know the various species of birds that they can get away with the practice. Laying an egg in an osprey or eagle's nest would likely mean they'd end up as food.

Is there any definitive research on this?

Yeah! They tend to specialize against particular species!

I don't have research documents on hand atm, but I do have a terrifying video about them from zefrank: https://youtu.be/9TZQDA2yabg

Sorry I didn't reply earlier when I first read post but then I only skimmed the video. Since seen it thoroughly several times and I am surprised at the extent of this parasitic action by birds, I knew vaguely about the cuckoo but not much else about the subject.

I think I've learned more from that story on 'Bin chickens than any other HN story in quite a while, it took me down all sorts of alleys, research papers, etc.

Initially I wasn't even going to click on this story as there are so many of them on HN and I've only a casual interest in birds from the fact that I see then in my neighborhood. It's interesting really how things turn out (and how one learns things).

Exactly. A bird isn't "raising young" in an abstract way. It has genes that produce certain behaviour. Build nest. Sit on egg. Roll egg out of nest if you get too hungry. Regurgitate food into squaking red mouth. Remove feces from nest. Taken together you get some level of success in reproduction.

And expecting a bird to be "intelligent" in this situation would imply a source of knowledge about what an egg is supposed to look like.

That makes sense, as I said above (after reading these posts) it seems to amount to how one defines intelligence. What you are referring to is survival/evolutionary intelligence which is inate/built-in and expressed though a bird's genes. What I was referring to was the cognitive intelligence (ability to learn from circumstance and experience and act upon it as covids and currawongs do over and above their inate/instinctive behavior).

I should have been more perceptive and not mixed these. This begs the question that I've posed elsewhere: the cuckoo and other parasitic birds would, I'd reckon, also act out of inate gene-based expression in that they'd have to be quite selective about which species of birds they lay their eggs in (as I said, if they were to lay eggs in an osprey or eagle's nest then they'd likely be food).

Any info on this?

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