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Friday 24 May 2019

Mystery egg

I made my first trip of the year to the Farne Islands last week.  I was with friends so I didn't take a big camera, which was liberating as I already have more than enough puffin photos, etc.  However, I did put the little Panasonic TZ90 in my pocket in case we saw anything unusual and it came in handy when we saw this.

 The kittiwake was standing staring at the egg as if unsure what to do.

 The mystery was explained by a National Trust warden.  The egg was laid by a razorbill in the kittiwake's nest in error. The razorbill wasn't allowed back to the egg and the standoff had been going on for two days.  By then the egg was probably non-viable but the kittiwake hadn't worked out how to get rid of it so it could lay its own (two) eggs.
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1 comment:

  1. HK30 May 2020 at 23:19

    This is really interesting! We also had a Razorbill's egg at a Kittiwake's nest site recently on Rathlin Island (https://twitter.com/_Stickybeak/status/1263575620820312071), but in this case the Kittiwake incubated it for a while, then the next day the Razorbills were back with the egg, then the day after that the Kittiwakes had reclaimed the ledge and the egg was gone.

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