The cuckoo still summons the Egyptian farmer to his field; men still make obeisance to the kite in spring.

Likeness to Mafia and correction in farming of Paganism ISIL
Don Corleone eat your heart out. Around the world, parasitic birds such as cuckoos and cowbirds are displaying the same mixture of guile, ruthlessness and brutality as any self-respecting Godfather. Using a delicate mixture of intimidation and retribution, they "persuade" other birds to accept their eggs and raise their chicks.

Ten years ago, Anders Pape Møller at Copenhagen University in Denmark and colleagues discovered that great spotted cuckoos (Clamator glandarius) run a mafia-style protection racket against magpies living in Andalucia, Spain.

If a magpie rejects a cuckoo egg laid in its nests, the cuckoo promptly returns to destroy the magpie's own eggs or kill its chicks.

Not to be outdone, American cowbirds, which are not related to cuckoos, employ an even more forceful racket against warblers. "The cowbird has much more sophisticated predatory behaviours than we thought," says Jeff Hoover at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign, US, who has been monitoring brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) for four years in the swamps of the Cache River in southern Illinois.

Swift retaliation

Wild warblers are very compliant with cowbirds, and are not known to recognise and eject cowbird eggs. But Hoover and Robinson wanted to find out what would happen if they did. To mimic this situation, they provided artificial nests for 180 pairs of prothonotary warblers (Protonotaria citrea), waited for the cowbirds to cuckold them, then selectively removed the cowbird eggs.

The cowbirds soon retaliated, returning to the nest to eat or destroy the remaining warbler eggs. What is more, warblers that had laid too early for the cowbirds to cuckold them suffered retribution too. Cowbirds would routinely eat or trash these more developed eggs to force the warblers to rebuild the nest elsewhere.

They would then spy on the warbler parents, find out where they were nesting anew, and sneak in to lay an egg at exactly the right time.

Better to comply

This process, which the researchers call "farming", enables the cowbirds to effectively manufacture a new breeding opportunity for themselves. On average, 20% of warbler nests were farmed in this way, and the cowbirds parasitised 85% of the rebuilt nests.

Hoover says the overall effect is that the cowbirds bully the warblers into "an evolutionary state of acceptance". It turns out to be more profitable for the warblers if they comply. On average, they raise three of their own chicks when they also support a cowbird chick. Yet they raise just one of their own if a cowbird egg has been rejected.

"This has been a controversial area, that cuckoos and cowbirds might have protection rackets to get their own eggs protected," says Becky Kilner, a researcher on cuckoos at the University of Cambridge, UK. She says that the study provides the best evidence yet that parasites destroy hosts' nests, and that hosts ultimately benefit by complying. Hoover is now tagging and filming wild cowbirds to see how they act in a natural environment unchanged by the researchers.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0609710104)

It becomes you, therefore, who are debaters of philosophy, for the sake of a good life, to imitate those who are acknowledged to be the nobler, who have had sexual intercourse ten thousand times.

Chapter XII. Jupiter's Amours

'And not to spend the time to no purpose in giving more examples, I shall begin with mentioning some embraces of Zeus himself, the father of gods and men. For it is impossible to mention all, on account of their multitude. Hear, therefore, the amours of this great Jupiter, which he concealed by changing his form, on account of the fanaticism of senseless men. For, in the first place, wishing to show to wise men that adultery is no sin, when he was going to marry, being, according to the multitude, knowingly an adulterer, in his first marriage, but not being so in reality, by means, as I said, of a seeming sin be accomplished a sinless marriage. For he married his own sister Hera, assuming the likeness of a cuckoo's wing; and of her were born Hebe and Ilithyia. For he gave birth to Metis without copulation with any one, as did also Hera to Vulcan.

Guy Perea Presidential Elector President of The United States