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Himalayan Cuckoo fed on eggs of Bianchi’s Warbler.

SU Tong-ping1,2, SHAO Ling2, HUO Juan2, YANG Can-chao2, LIANG Wei2*#br#   

  1. (1 College of Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China; 2 Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Tropical Plant and Animal Ecology, College of Life Sciences, Hainan Normal University, Haikou 571158, China).
  • Online:2017-01-10 Published:2017-01-10

Abstract: Some avian parasites (i.e., cuckoos) usually remove or eat one or two host eggs before laying their own eggs on host nest. This behavior indicates that parasitic cuckoos could also be nest predators. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain the cuckoo predation behavior: (1) cuckoos may depredate host nests that are unsuitable for parasitism and force the host to renest, then cuckoo would get more chance for parasitism (nest farming); (2) cuckoo may depredate host nests as a retaliatory behavior if the host rejected cuckoo’s eggs. In Kuankuoshui National Nature Reserve, Guizhou, southwest China, we found one case of the Himalayan Cuckoo (Cuculus saturatus) fed on eggs of the Bianchi’s Warbler (Seicercus latouchei) by using a video record in June 2015. To our knowledge, this is the first report on predation of the Himalayan Cuckoo on its warbler host. This study shows that the Himalayan Cuckoo is not only a brood parasite but also a nest predator. The motivation of cuckoo predation on warbler nest of this record seemed to meet with the first hypothesis, namely nest farming.