Top 25 Wild Bird Brood Parasites

Brood parasites are an incredibly interesting group of birds. Instead of going to the trouble of building their own nests and raising their own young, they out-source these functions to other birds. They will lay their eggs in the nests of other breeding birds and allow them to raise their young on their behalf. They achieve this through a number of adaptations. Some species mimic the colour and shape of the host’s egg. Others have chicks with structures in their mouths which hyper stimulate the parents to feed them. The adult or chick parasite will also often kill the hosts’s chicks or remove the eggs in the nest, thus ensuring that the parasite survives. However hosts are not completely helpless to this attack, hosts have co-evolved behaviours such as abandoning a nest if it is parasitised. However some hosts are capable of raising both their own young and a parasite, without any visible cost.

Here we present 25 of best photographs of brood parasites, enjoy! If you would like to share your photographs with us, you can upload them to the Facebook page with species, location and photographer as the caption. We will announce next week’s theme this coming Sunday.

Our mission is to build a global community around the freedom and beauty of birds in the wild as ambassadors for the natural ecosystems that they depend upon. They are the music, decoration, and character of every terrestrial habitat on the planet and have been around since the dinosaurs. They are the witnesses and ambassadors of the awesome power of nature. The wide availability of good, cheap optics has opened their world to us for the last few decades. Amazing, affordable DSLR cameras with long lenses are delivering brilliant digital bird imagery to online communities.

We are in a day-and-age during which more bird species are threatened with extinction than ever before. The Wild Birds! Revolution aims to publish the “Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week” to 1 million people every week by the end of the year. That is a revolution that will change the world! Join thousands of other weekend naturalists, photographers, birders, experts, hikers, nature-lovers, guides, scientists, conservationists and artists that share the thousands of wild bird photographs submitted to the Wild Bird Trust website and Facebook page. Thousands of wild bird enthusiasts are going out every day to photograph our planet’s beautiful birdlife. Pick up your camera, fill your bird feeder, open your heart, and join the Wild Birds! Revolution!!

Edited by Christie Craig, Campaign Manager

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/03/29/wild-birds-of-the-night/