Last month, a friend of mine posted a photo of a local bird's nest onto Facebook. The caption read, "one of these things is not like the other," and the image featured 4 robin's-egg blue eggs alongside one larger white egg with cocoa-colored speckles.
“Not like the other,” indeed.
The outlier belonged to the brown-headed cowbird, a smallish, stocky blackbird with a fascinating approach to raising its young. Cowbirds are our area’s most common brood parasites, meaning that they make no nest of their own and instead lay eggs in the nests of other avian species.
