Female brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) singing at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge near New York City. (Credit: Rhododendrites / CC BY-SA 4.0) Brown-headed cowbirds, Molothrus ater, are fascinating ...

The parasitic birds have evolved extra endurance to help them steal food from their host species, new research finds.

This data set concerns the possible effects of brood parasitism on the species composition of a songbird community. Your instructor will give you directions about using this file to make figures ...

How to use this data set in a class: This data set could be used in discussions of community ecology (species diversity), species interactions (brood parasitism), and management of an endangered bird ...

Our standard mode of written expression, which started as letter writing, currently hovers around the level of the tweet–140-character missives about anything (or nothing) at all. Perhaps not for long ...

Nature has so many different ways to accomplish just one task – reproduction. At this time of year, it seems that everywhere I look I see baby birds. It’s a blizzard of baby birds being fed by their ...

DEAR JOAN: A California towhee has built a nest in our jasmine bush. She laid three eggs about one week ago. Now we look in the nest and there is a fourth egg and it sure looks like a cowbird egg. We ...

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery ;)" That's the tweet, from @cowbird, in response to the launch of Facebook's user-generated content engine, Facebook Stories. It's half-wry, half-serious, it ...

If you've heard anything about cowbirds, it's likely been some harsh criticism, since the birds have a bad reputation: Rather than take care of their own chicks, they drop their eggs into the nest of ...

In last week’s column, mention was made of an unusual observation by Jan Rush of Egypt, who videotaped what she thought was a male cardinal “courting” a female cowbird. The redbird offered food to it, ...