This is not about one of the fables from my last post.
Since they crow stole My Dear’s bun, this hooded crow and his mate have adopted us as their special friends or at least so we feel. We come and sit in our garden and they come to greet us, hoping for a piece of our breakfast. Now and again, they will get a bite and so they come again, to be observed and even allowing being photographed!
At the end of May for about 10 days they presented to us their chick.
However, it turns out that their chick is a cuckoo chick.
They had been hijacked to raise a cuckoo chick. They did not bring along a crow chick, so I assume it had not survived; usually the cuckoo egg will hatch earlier than the hosts’ and often the cuckoo chick will dispose of any host eggs.
From the photos here you can see this couple was very good foster parents.
Over several days I managed to photograph how they fed the chick.
When they brought the chick, they all three of them made the noisiest cries, so everybody in the neighborhood were aware of their presence.
And then 10 days later we never saw the cuckoo again, but its foster parents are very loyal visitors in our garden; I assume that they consider it their garden and pantry and we are their loyal visitors.
The cuckoo here is a great spotted cuckoo.
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