Tiny hedge sparrow feeds cuckoo five times its size

This is the moment a tiny hedge sparrow brought breakfast for a baby cuckoo five times it’s size – after being duped into thinking it was the larger bird’s mother. Cuckoos are brood parasites which push the eggs out of another bird’s nest and lay one of their own.

In a bizarre twist of nature this exhausted ‘mother’ sparrow had continued to feed the bulky cuckoo after it had fledged and left the nest. Retired engineer Mike Stuckey, 64, photographed the unlikely pair in the garden of his home in Halstock, Somerset.



The cuckoo, which had left the ‘mother’ sparrow’s nest began appearing in trees and plant pots around the garden and continued to ‘’squeak” for its food. The tiny brown foster mother would then pop down with a grub or a worm for the greedy youngster – before climbing up its back in order to feed it.

Mike snapped the incredible image with his Cannon Powershot digital camera. The cuckoo had perched on the side of pot of miniature foxgloves and began crying for its foster mum to bring it a meal. The hedge sparrow, also called a dunnock, would then swoop down every five or ten minutes with a morsel, climb up the cuckoo’s back, and pop it in the bird’s mouth.