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, ...

When the female cowbird lays her egg in the nest, she also removes one or two warbler eggs from the nest. Generally, she takes out more eggs than she puts in the nest. When throwing away eggs, she is ...

The Auk, Vol. 114, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 66-73 (8 pages) The shells of Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) eggs are unusually strong from the outside, presumably to reduce chances of puncture ...

Q. Do brown-headed cowbirds select the nest of another bird to lay eggs in based on which species raised them as a nestling? In other words, if a cowbird is raised as a chick by a red-winged blackbird ...

DEAR JOAN: A California towhee has built a nest in our jasmine bush. She laid three eggs about one week ago. Now we look in the nest and there is a fourth egg and it sure looks like a cowbird egg. We ...

The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Vol. 120, No. 4 (Dec., 2008), pp. 667-673 (8 pages) Grassland passerines are purported to tolerate parasitism by Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater) because of ...

Several people reported a strange sight at their feeders this past week. In all cases, a small bird was busily feeding a much larger begging bird. The smaller bird was indeed the parent. Unfortunately ...

The brown-headed cowbird is one of the most hated birds in the entirety of the animal kingdom. Each springtime, when most birds are settling down to build their nests, the cowbird is sneakily plotting ...

If you've heard anything about cowbirds, it's likely been some harsh criticism, since the birds have a bad reputation: Rather than take care of their own chicks, they drop their eggs into the nest of ...

The birds in my Decatur yard usually give me joy, but the other morning a couple of birds hanging out at the feeders made me wince. They were brown-headed cowbirds, which, during the nesting season, ...

DEAR JOAN: A California towhee has built a nest in our jasmine bush. She laid three eggs about one week ago. Now we look in the nest and there is a fourth egg and it sure looks like a cowbird egg. We ...