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Welcome to African Cuckoos

A project of the Max Planck-University of Cape Town Centre for Behaviour and Coevolution.

Max Planck University of Cape Town Centre for Behaviour and Coevolution Logo

Adaptation, mimicry and co-evolution in Africa’s avian cheats: cuckoo finches, honeyguides, indigobirds & cuckoos.

Brood parasites are the cheats of the bird world. They exploit the parental care of other species (their hosts) to raise their young. Hosts suffer if they are successfully tricked by a brood parasite, because brood-parasitic chicks monopolise access to food provided by host parents, and some species actively kill the host’s eggs and chicks.

This conflict between brood parasites and their hosts has led to some of the most beautiful examples of adaptation seen in nature. They also provide ideal study systems for field research on coevolution – the process by which two or more species affect each other’s evolution. As the brood parasite adapts to better exploit the host, the host often evolves counter-adaptations to better defend itself against the parasite.

We are a group of evolutionary biologists studying brood parasites (and other interesting birds) in the field in Choma, Zambia, since 2006, based jointly in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

The project is led by Prof. Claire Spottiswoode, Principal Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, and Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology at the University of Cape Town, and is co-led by Dr Gabriel Jamie, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Research Associate at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town.

In Zambia, we work with colleagues at the Livingstone Museum, the Department of Zoology and Aquatic Sciences at Copperbelt University and Choma Museum, in collaborative research, public outreach, and capacity-building.

On this website you can find out more about our work, the brood parasites and other interesting birds we study, see photos of our fieldwork, and read a bit about who we are, what we’ve written, and who supports our work.

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News

New paper out on the evolution of ornamented nestlings

Our paper "Coevolution and the diversification of nestling ornamentation in a species-rich avian radiation" has now been published in the journal Evolution. This paper, led by Gabriel Jamie, explores the diversification of nestling ornamentation across the estrildid...

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Rainy Season Fieldwork

Tanmay Dixit had a very fruitful field season from January to April 2025, studying cuckoo finches and their hosts in Choma.

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Congratulations to Maggie Mwale and Cameron Blair on graduation with Distinction

Many congratulations to Maggie Mwale and Cameron Blair, both of whom graduated with Distinction for their MSc degrees at the University of Cape Town, involving field research in Zambia. As part of her Conservation Biology MSc, Maggie studied long-term changes in the lightness of eggs of ground-nesting birds in Choma, linking these changes to increases in temperature at the study site. Cameron’s MSc by research focussed on begging call mimicry and host manipulation by honeyguides.

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Supported By:

EU ERC logo
The-Leverhulme-Trust
BBSRC
LOreal-UNESCO-For-Women-in-Science
Percy-FitzPatrick-Institute
The-Royal-Society
Marie-Curie-Actions
EU ERC logo
BBSRC
The-Leverhulme-Trust
The-Royal-Society
Percy-FitzPatrick-Institute
LOreal-UNESCO-For-Women-in-Science
Marie-Curie-Actions