Does a cuckoo know it's a cuckoo? The answer is more difficult than you might think, explains Richard Pallardy ...

Clever birds figure out how to trick others into raising their kids A common Cuckoo chick in Reed Wablers nest waits to be fed with its mouth wide open, in this undated file photo. Getty Images — ...

Birds are the most diverse land vertebrate on the planet, and now scientists have constructed a complete evolutionary tree of the 11,000 or so known species. This data came from hundreds of studies ...

Nest building is costly. It requires time, energy, and constant defence from predators. For birds that raise their own young, this investment makes sense because it ensures survival of their chicks.

An international team of scientists has created the largest and most detailed bird family tree ever, spanning 93 million years and representing 92% of bird families species, using cutting-edge ...

Most birds spend hours, days, or even weeks painstakingly building their nests. Some birds make nests out of mud, some build nests in trees, and some birds nest on the ground and simply scrape out a ...

Cuckoos – which lay their eggs in nests of other birds – have higher speciation rates when they lay their eggs in a broader range of host bird species’ nests, a new study reports. This higher ...

Using cutting-edge computational methods and supercomputing infrastructure, researchers have built the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date -- an intricate chart delineating 93 million ...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. How do new species arise? And why are there so many of them? One possible ...

Birds are the only dinosaur lineage that survived until today. About 66 million years ago at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, a mass extinction event destroyed all non-avian dinosaurs, ...