DON CORLEONE, eat your heart out. Around the world, parasitic birds such as cuckoos and cowbirds are displaying the same combination of guile, ruthlessness and brutality as any self-respecting Godfather in order to “persuade” other birds to accept their eggs and raise their chicks.
In the 1990s, Anders Pape Møller of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and colleagues discovered that great spotted cuckoos (Clamator glandarius) run a mafia-style protection racket against magpies living in Andalusia, Spain. If a magpie rejects a cuckoo egg laid in its nest, the cuckoo promptly returns to destroy the magpie’s own eggs…
