Conned by the cuckoo
QUESTION Will a cuckoo lay its egg in a the nest of a bird of prey?
KNOWN for its distinctive call, the cuckoo is also famous for laying its eggs in the nests of other birds.
even though in flight it can be mistaken for a sparrowhawk or kestrel, because it has swept-back wings and a long tail, it will not target the nests of birds of prey, preferring to choose foster parents smaller than itself.
the reason it chooses a smaller species to raise its young is that after hatching, the young cuckoo grows rapidly and is able to eject the host’s chicks from the nest to monopolise the food brought by the parents.
the cuckoo is so aggressive that when it finds a host nest with eggs close to being hatched, it destroys them. this forces the host birds to lay fresh eggs, giving the cuckoo a chance to add one of its own.
the most common species in Britain targeted by cuckoos to raise their young is the dunnock, followed by the meadow pipit, reed warbler, robin and pied wagtail.
Other birds occasionally tricked into being foster parents include the blackbird, marsh warbler, linnet, spotted flycatcher, chaffinch and yellowhammer.
the cuckoo’s success in persuading other birds to raise its young is down to its ability to mimic the eggs of the host — in size, spots, colour and shade. Placed side by side, it can be difficult to tell them apart.
however, when it comes to the dunnock, the cuckoo doesn’t try to mimic its eggs. Just why the dunnock is unable to spot the difference and eject the strange egg from its nest, when other birds can, is just one of a number of mysteries surrounding this remarkable process.
Duncan Crowe, Crawley, W. Sussex.
QUESTION If intelligent life on a planet in Alpha Centauri’s solar
system viewed Earth through a very powerful telescope, what part of our history would they be observing? ALPHA Centauri is the nearest star system to our sun at 4.35 light years away. that’s 25 trillion miles from earth — nearly 300,000 times the distance from the earth to the sun.
sunlight takes eight minutes and 17 seconds to travel from the surface of the sun to the earth. a light year is a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 5.88 trillion miles.
If the inhabitants of a planet in the alpha Centauri solar system pointed a telescope at the earth, then because the system is 4.35 light years away, they would be viewing events from November 2013, such as the release of the disney film Frozen, which went on to become the highest-grossing animated film of all time.
If we take the red giant Betelgeuse, which is 643 light years away, an observer from that system would be viewing events on earth in 1375, at the height of the hundred Years war between england and France.
Damian Gower, Cardiff.
QUESTION Did German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche predict the two world wars?
FRIedRICh wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) exerted a huge influence over western philosophy in the 20th century. however, he was ignored for most of his lifetime. It was only after 1889, when he became clinically insane due to suffering from advanced syphilis, that he gained recognition.
Nietzsche’s famous quote ‘God is dead’ appears in several of his works. It first appeared in die frohliche wissenschaft (the Gay science) in 1882: ‘God is dead. God remains dead. and we have killed him. how shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?’
Beginning at the Renaissance in the late Middle ages and continuing through the enlightenment in the 18th century, religion was put to the test as science began to explain what had once been mysterious.
during Nietzsche’s time, darwin’s theories on evolution were becoming accepted. this led to scepticism about religion, giving way to atheism and nihilism — the rejection of religious and moral principles based on the belief that life is meaningless.
Nietzsche believed people would look to other ‘gods’, such as dictators, for guidance.
these leaders would gain power over people by promising ‘heaven on earth’, and the rise of new ideologies would result in a clash of arms.
In 1893’s the will to Power, he wrote: ‘For some time now, our whole european culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing decade to decade.’
Nietzsche predicted the catastrophes of the two world wars before anyone else. he saw them not just as military events, but as symbolic forces or sweeping cultural affairs that would alter everything.
after he was declared insane, Nietzsche’s estate fell into the hands of his sister elisabeth, who distorted his works after his death by adding her own extreme nationalist and antisemitic views. the Nazis then used these corrupted versions to justify their atrocities.
Paul Wilson, London e11.
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