Those are the first lines of a song written in 1979 by Bill Staines, once a regular on Garrison Keillor's radio show. The brown-headed cowbird, our resident cowbird, does have a place in the choir, ...

Black birds with a greenish sheen and brown heads sometimes visit my yard during spring migration. These are male brown-headed cowbirds, and they often arrive in mixed flocks of red-winged blackbirds ...

Many species of birds get reputations of various sorts. One species that gets a bad rap, through no fault of its own, is the brown-headed cowbird. The female cowbird lays its eggs in the nests of ...

Female brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) singing at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge near New York City. (Credit: Rhododendrites / CC BY-SA 4.0) Brown-headed cowbirds, Molothrus ater, are fascinating ...

Some cowbirds make warblers an offer they can't refuse: Brood over my eggs, or I'll rough up your nest. Cowbirds are a parasitic species that lay eggs in the nests of other birds, called hosts, which ...

Every spring I get reports from astonished readers describing a small bird feeding a much larger, obviously begging chick. Can you explain this, readers ask. The answer is “brood parasitism.” ...

Since the 1960s, biologists have made fake eggs for some studies of bird behavior. But Mark Hauber of Hunter College in New York says this kind of scientific handicraft is not exactly his forte. "With ...