Lucy Cooke

The jacana’s reputation swings wildly between saint and sinner.

This tropical freshwater wader (think moorhen on stilts) is known variously as the Jesus bird or the pr******te bird. The holy nickname comes from its enormous feet, which spread its weight so evenly it appears to walk on water. The solicitous one refers to the female’s prodigious s*xual appetite, among the greediest in the bird world. She mates with multiple males, often several times an hour.

Whether she's saint or sinner, the female jacana seems to have life figured out. As I discovered when I spent a sticky morning looking for them on lake Nicaragua.

Large, beefy females battled noisily on lily pads, jousting with long yellow bills, while the much smaller males quietly built nests and tended chicks. He is a candidate for Nature's best dad and even protects his charges by carrying them around in his wing pits. This is the jacana way. Females are up to 75% heavier and twice the size of males, and they’re the dominant s*x. Each female maintains a harem of up to four “husbands” who build nests, incubate eggs, and raise the young.

Aside from laying eggs, females play little role in childcare. Their job is bodyguard, not nanny. Prime territory, rich in floating vegetation for buoyant nests and crawling with insects, is fiercely contested, and females spend their time defending it from rival jacanas and egg-thieving birds like purple gallinules.

After mating dozens of times with multiple males, a female lays up to four eggs per nest. Each male then spends around three months raising chicks, some of which may not be his own. This apparent “cuckoldry” has long puzzled ornithologists, but is widespread in nature. I will be exploring this so-called 'Darwinian paradox' in my new book, which is almost finished....spoiler these cucks are not the evolutionary 'losers' we have been led to believe.