Showing posts with label incubation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label incubation. Show all posts

Thursday 8 November 2012

Dedication and Commitment


This male frogmouth has now been sitting on his nest for ten weeks. Unfortunately he must be covering infertile eggs as the normal incubation period is about four weeks. I don't know how many eggs he has, but it seems particularly unfortunate as he is in a relationship with two females, as he has been for the past two years when they have raised three and two chicks. I haven't had a camera up at the nest to see which birds are doing what proportion of the night-time incubation, but hopefully they will give up on the eggs soon and they can all get on, and build themselves up back into condition. There was another pair which incubated a dud egg last year (after losing a partly-developed egg over the side of the nest early on) and they didn't give up until the end of November.