Cuckoo Families

This group gathers taxon/Bird Families subcategory members that are themselves bird families belonging to the order Cuculiformes, the cuckoos, anis and coucals, a mostly tropical and subtropical group best known in popular imagination for the many true cuckoo species that practice brood parasitism, laying eggs in the nests of other bird species and leaving the unwitting host to raise the cuckoo chick, often at the direct expense of the host's own young. Not every family or even every species gathered here is a brood parasite, however: the anis and coucals build and tend their own nests, and even among the true cuckoos a considerable number of species raise their own young conventionally. Every family gathered here shares zygodactyl feet, two toes forward and two back, an arrangement independently evolved in several unrelated bird orders including the parrots and woodpeckers gathered elsewhere in this atlas.