This story appears in the January 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine. For the care and feeding of its offspring, the common cuckoo outsources. When she’s ready to lay an egg, a female ...

The sound imitates the call of the Common Cuckoo, a summer migrant between Europe and Asia, about the size of a sparrowhawk. The first known reference to the call was written in Middle English in ...

Some calls, however, are quite similar. Common in eastern North America, the yellow-billed cuckoo is becoming increasingly rare and local in much of the West. It breeds in open woodlands with ...