By Susan Milius
Cheating pays, sort of. But for a glossy blue-black bird with a bright yellow eye, cheating doesn’t outdo regular honest parenting.
The greater ani, a type of cuckoo found from Panama to the Amazon Basin, usually starts out as a dutiful parent. Two or three male-female pairs typically build and fill a communal nest “like a big basket of eggs,” says behavioral ecologist Christina Riehl of Princeton University.
But if a snake or some other disaster kills the young, a bereft female sometimes gets sneaky. She slips into neighboring ani nests and leaves an egg here and there that she won’t care for, but the rightful nest owners might. Not all females from trashed nests do that. Some just wait for the next breeding season, when all the birds get a fresh start building another nest.