Baby Birds

​What’s with “The Ugly Duckling”? I’m a biology and chemistry major. Swans never – absolutely NEVER –lay their eggs in other birds’ nests.  Plus baby swans are cute – even by duckling standards.

To make matters even worse, the whole point of the Hans Christian Andersen story seems to be that outer beauty is important. The swan is only accepted when he becomes an adult. The other swans and ducks praise him as the most beautiful of all. It just doesn’t happen that way — and it shouldn’t.
It’s a misleading role model to show young children. No child wants to wait until s/he grows up to find out if s/he will be accepted, let alone praised as the most beautiful of all. They want to be accepted now. And they don’t need physical beauty to achieve that. The cuckoo bird provides a much more appropriate story.
Cuckoos do lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. They particularly like to lay their eggs in warblers’ nests.  They never raise their own chicks. Cuckoos are ugly. They smell bad. They eat about six times as much as a warbler chick. A mama warbler who gets one plopped into her nest has to work twice as hard as she would if she only had her own chicks to raise. But she does it.
She’s not a martyr. She knows this interloper isn’t her own. She feeds it anyway. The arrangement is what biologists call mutualism. Cuckoo eggs hatch before warbler eggs. They grow to be bigger than warblers. If a predator, such as a cat, comes along and tries to eat the warbler’s eggs, that cuckoo is on guard. It will spray its stinky spray right in the cat’s face and save the unhatched warbler chicks. It will do the same after the warbler chicks have hatched. By taking care of the cuckoo chick, mama warbler has protected her own chicks.
Francie and I like setting the record straight. Our tale of cuckoo and warbler will be our sixth Science Folktale.  Just One More Egg is available for pre-order: mybook.to/egg There will also be paperback and hardcover editions.