Being a parent is hard.

Raising a family takes a lot of energy and time.

If you have kids, you know what I'm talking about.

I mean, I don't have kids, but I do have some pet chickens.

I imagine that's pretty close to the same thing.

When you're an exhausted parent and you wish you had some time to just live your own life,

you might secretly fantasize about taking your kids over

to your neighbor, dropping them off and saying, here, these are yours now. I've got better things to do,

like sleep. Now I know you'd never do that, of course, but there are many birds out there that have

no qualms about dumping their offspring into the care of a neighbor

or even a complete stranger. This is the phenomenon we call brood parasitism. It occurs in a number

of birds as well as some fish and insects. In birds, this is where a female lays an egg in the

nest of another female or mated pair.

The parasite female flies away and never sees her offspring.

The host bird or birds are fooled into raising the foreign chick as their own.

The brood parasite seems to get a pretty sweet deal.

She doesn't have to spend energy in time raising her own chicks.

She just drops her hot little eggs into the other bird's nests,

and then she spends her days pursuing her hobbies and living her best life.

She gets to pass her jeans on without doing much work.

The host birds, on the other hand, get the short end of the stick.

They spend enormous amounts of energy raising a baby that isn't their own. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, this can defeat the whole purpose of

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