Crow and Cuckoo

The crow built a cozy little nest with her partner, working hard every day. With the nest she built many a dream of herself and her partner, living peacefully and cozily in that little nest. She got in a variety of soft material like pieces of rags, feathers, cotton pieces and so on from here and there, trying to make the place warm and cozy for her little ones. Her kids would be born there, and she would feed them well and teach them to fly. Theirs would then be a perfect little family.

The nest was then built fully; she laid eggs there, her dream getting stronger everyday. Then came in a cuckoo, when the crows were away. The cuckoo slyly pushed aside one of the crow’s eggs and lay her own in place of it and fled. The crow that was totally oblivious of her egg replaced by cuckoo’s, scrupulously continued with her work of hatching the eggs.

The cuckoo’s egg hatched first, way before her own and she was excited. She fed the little one with all her might and saw the little one grow up. By now she realized that it was not her own kid, but she continued to feed the little one, since the little one was born in her own nest, by her own warmth,a nd it was away from its parents. What she failed to notice was that in bringing up her pseudo-kid, she neglected her own eggs and had failed to hatch them.

The little cuckoo grew stronger and faster, feeding on all that was fed by its crow-mother. The crow excitedly gave lessons to the little one on how to fly. In its ambition to fly, the little one had pushed off the other unhatched eggs out of the nest while fluttering its wings. It soon learnt to fly and off it flew, and joined its cuckoo group.
Back at the nest, the crow was left alone with its partner.

Facts:
Cuckoos indeed do find a crows’ nest and lay eggs there. They are cunning enough as the male distracts the crows away from their nest, and the female quickly lays its eggs there. The cuckoo’s egg is hatched first and the little one grows faster. Meanwhile the cunning little one pushes off the crow’s eggs or the baby crows and gobbles most of the food brought in by the parent crows. The crows do realize that it is not their baby, but still feed it. They start hating the young one only when it starts coooo-cooo-ing unlike their kaw-kwas. By then the young one would have grown enough to fly off and join its group. The story repeats again when the little one grows up when it again finds another crow nest to lay eggs.
Facts Courtesy: KP Poornachandra Tejaswi’s MinchuLLi