Biological responses to climate change have been widely documented across taxa and regions, but it remains unclear whether species are maintaining a good match between phenotype and environment, i.e. whether observed trait ...

Background: Avian brood parasites and their hosts are involved in complex offence-defense coevolutionary arms races. The most common pair of reciprocal adaptations in these systems is egg discrimination by hosts and egg ...

Food supply and weather are among the main factors limiting bird numbers. In raptors prey availability may be closely linked to the reproduction output while weather conditions most often act indirectly by modifying food ...

Large-scale international monitoring studies are important to assess emission patterns and environmental distributions of organohalogenated contaminants (OHCs) on a worldwide scale. In this study, the presence of OHCs was ...

Host quality is critical for parasites. The common cuckoo Cuculus canorus is a generalist avian brood parasite, but individual females show strong preference for a specific host species. Here, we use three extensive datasets ...

Different populations of a host species subject to variable patterns of selection due to cuckoo parasitism provide an optimal situation for studying natural selection and coevolution in action. We compared egg appearance ...

In this exposé we provide the first review of host use by brood parasitic cuckoos in a multiple-cuckoo system in China, based on our own long-term field data and a compilation of observations obtained from the literature. ...

Although parasites and their hosts often coexist in a set of environmentally differentiated populations connected by gene flow, few empirical studies have considered a role of environmental variation in shaping correlations ...

How do potential hosts escape detrimental interactions with brood parasites? Current consensus is that hole-nesting and granivorous birds avoid brood parasites, like common cuckoos Cuculus canorus , by their inaccessible ...