Posted by Joy on February 13, 2004 at 16:22:21 from 195.157.57.17 user Joy.
Proof that the coots in no. 7 really knew what was going on comes in this page I found at National Geographic (while failing to find a world map showing how swallows migrate).
To most people, coots are noisy, quarrelsome water birds that do a lot of splashing about. But it turns out they are also closet cuckoos. Not only that, they can count.
The discovery was made by Bruce Lyon, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His study of an American coot colony in British Columbia, Canada, is the first to show that birds can keep a reckoning of the eggs they lay. It also highlights an extremely rare example of counting by a wild animal.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0402_030402_coots.html
First time I've tried a link - let's see if it works!