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 ...

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 ...

The cuckoo was once a common species from Lake Washington in Seattle to the San Pedro River in southern Arizona and countless places in between. Today, with the loss of gallery riparian forests to ...