In order to mitigate the detrimental impacts of brood parasitism on their own reproduction, many hosts have evolved anti-parasitism strategies to enhance their fitness. Many studies have shown that the host’s antiparasitic defenses may occur at different stages of its life cycle. In this review, we discussed various host defenses against cuckoo parasitism at different stages of the breeding cycle, e.g., nest defense, egg recognition and egg rejection, nestling and fledgling discrimination, and then outlined basic research methods in host defense used for the field experiment.