How the clever cuckoo fools its victims by sounding like a hawk

THEY are already well known for the sneaky way in which they hide their eggs in the nests of other birds.

And now it has been discovered that cuckoos mimic birds of prey to make sure others raise their young.

A female cuckoo does not make the distinctive ‘cuck-oo’ call of the male but instead copies a sparrowhawk. The sound scares its victims so much they fail to notice the imposter egg.

If the cuckoo successfully tricks a brooding bird, her chick will thrive at the expense of the birds’ own offspring.

The discovery was made by zoologists at

Cambridge University, who have studied cuckoos and the reed warblers they target in Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire, for 30 years. They found reed warblers panicked when they heard a female cuckoo’s ‘chuckling’ call, just as they did after hearing a sparrowhawk.

The study, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, states: ‘The female cuckoo might have the “last laugh” in this particular battle between host defence and parasite trickery.’