As per heading: super-silly-trivial-fiddling-while-Rome-burns enquiry, from one who takes the “ostrich” route and as far as possible, ignores things political. (Am torn between GQ and MPSIMS.)
Among the hate-epithets being tossed around in the current unhappy political climate, I’ve been rather tickled – irrelevantly – by one, “Beta-cuck”. I’m aware that the political context is nothing to do with birds: nonetheless, it brings unstoppably to mind for me, the memory (true or false) of having read long ago, that there are in the world, species of cuckoo which of course lay their egg in other bird species’ nests; but instead of the cuckoo chick – as with many species – pushing the other chicks / eggs out of the nest – it makes friends with the “real” chicks, and doesn’t try to oust them; and presumably, all things being well, everyone gets enough food to survive.
“The fittest”, etc. – such cuckoo species would seem to be wimpish, and definitely “Beta” in the pecking order: evolutionarily, the types of cuckoo where the chick ejects the “real” ones would appear to have a big advantage. Only, evolutionary stuff is complicated…
Would like to ask: are there indeed, such relatively benign cuckoo species as described above – or did I imagine, or dream, the whole thing?
Yes, one example is the Great-spotted cuckoo whose chicks grow up along side the host’s chicks and are thought to provide protection to its host family via secreting a sent that repels predators.
Great Spotted Cuckoo chicks, unlike Common Cuckoos, don’t kill the nestlings of their hosts, Carrion Crows. In fact, because cuckoo chicks have a scent that repels predators, where predators are common their crow nestmates may survive better than those in nests that don’t contain a cuckoo chick. However, where predators are less common the crow chicks may die because of competition for food from the cuckoo chick.
In some cases, if a host bird ejects the egg of a Great Spotted Cuckoo, the female will come back and destroy all the other eggs. This can account for maintenance of the trait of individuals not ousting the cuckoo eggs (along with the predation protection factor), since birds that don’t reject the cuckoo egg will produce more offspring. This has become known as the “Mafia Hypothesis.” (“Raise my chick, or your whole family will die.”)
Surely the Mafia Hypothesis should be phrased as, “That’s a really nice clutch of eggs you got there. Be a real shame if anything were to happen to it.”
It may be used politically now, but “cuck” as an insult does derive from cuckoo behavior. It comes from cuckold, a husband whose wife was unfaithful, because the female cuckoo goes around laying her eggs in the nests of other birds.
“The cuckoo now, from every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
Cuckoo ! Cuckoo ! Cuckoo, O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.”
Our only cuckoo species in the UK, Cuculus canorus – summer-visiting here: its chick ejects all competitors from the nest, no messing – is for various reasons not doing very well these days, and getting appreciably rarer. Our Royal Society For The Protection of Birds – trying to address the species’s plight – ran an appeal not long ago, asking people to (for a fee) “adopt a cuckoo” – which they could name. I was tempted to sign up, just so that I could call my cuckoo “O Word Of Fear”.
