Cuckoo Birds

Cuckoo birds are well known for placing their eggs inside the nests of other birds in order to be hatched. It had been supposed by most scientists, for this reason, that cuckoo young need no guidance from their parents in order to become fully fledged members of their species. What has been recently discovered, however, is that male cuckoo birds will fly from tree to tree looking for nests with newly hatched young, from birds who may or not may be their own, and sit on a nearby branch and sing the distinctive cuckoo bird song. The baby cuckoo birds, in the midst of other calls and songs made by the alien species that are raising them, will pick-out this one song made by a bird from another branch and learn to repeat it. And so the cuckoo bird song survives across the generations, memorized as an oddly familiar story, told by a stranger to a child.