Just the other day I was talking with @julzmaioro and she asked if I had seen a cuckoo. My reply was 'no'. I couldn't believe it when we arrived at Puhoi today and there in the tree was a young shining cuckoo. It was wanting food from its much smaller foster mother (a grey warbler) - in fact it was insisting that it was starving! Such a parasitic bird, the adult cuckoo laying its egg in a warbler's nest. When it lays the egg, it kicks one warbler's egg out, thus leaving the same number for the mother to sit on. The cuckoo hatches ahead of the warbler eggs, then it kicks out the other eggs or the warbler chicks if they happen to have already hatched. The unsuspecting warbler rears the chick, which grows much, much bigger than her. I was disappointed not to have captured them together for a size comparison.
