At Wicken Fen, where several hundred warblers arrive to breed each May, between 10% and 20% of reed warblers nests were used by cuckoos. Today only 2% of warbler nests at Wicken host cuckoos.

Reed warblers face an ongoing battle to prevent cuckoos laying eggs in their nests By Sarah Knapton 22 January 2016 • 3:31pm Reed warblers still feed cuckoo chicks even though they are far ...

Reed warblers use mobbing as a front line of nest defense against parasitic cuckoos, according to a new report published online on January 29th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

Inexperienced reed warblers can learn how to stop cuckoos from laying eggs in their nests by watching how other members of their species deal with the parasitic birds, a new study shows.

Reed warblers live with the threat that a cuckoo bird will infiltrate their nest, remove one of their eggs and replace it with the cuckoo's own. This "parasitism" enables the cuckoo to have its ...

To test this hypothesis, the researchers placed a 3-D cuckoo dummy near the nests of great reed warbler pairs, a host commonly exploited by the cuckoo. The dummy was perceived by the hosts as a threat ...

The researchers faked a foreign, parasitic egg in 75 different reed warbler nests by taking one egg out, painting it brown, and putting it back. Then they played one of the four calls near each nest.

For obvious reasons, reed warblers have never been happy with the arrangement. They will attack female cuckoos on sight, reducing the chance of their nest being targeted.

In 2021, Halupka published a paper showing that as the world heated up and the spring lengthened, reed warblers were getting more successful fledglings out of the nest — not fewer.. Climate ...

image: A cuckoo chick ejects a reed warbler egg from a warbler nest. view more Credit: Richard Nicoll. It's a risky business being a reed warbler. Not only do these tiny birds embark on an annual ...

Reed Warblers operate a ‘neighbourhood watch’ system to alert fellow birds to the threat of cuckoos. Cuckoos are one of the biggest threats to reed warblers because they secretly lay their own ...