{"id":44526,"date":"2016-12-23T05:41:41","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T12:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=44526"},"modified":"2016-12-23T05:41:41","modified_gmt":"2016-12-23T12:41:41","slug":"a-mysterious-long-billed-curlew-egg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/23\/a-mysterious-long-billed-curlew-egg\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mysterious Long-billed Curlew Egg"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regular readers know that I occasionally recycle an old blog post because few current blog followers have seen it. This one was originally\u00a0published on May 23, 2012. I’ve reprocessed the images and rewritten\u00a0much of the text.<\/em><\/p>\n

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A couple of days ago on Antelope Island we spotted a far off\u00a0Long-billed Curlew in flight with something large\u00a0in its bill. It was much too distant for decent photos but I was curious about what it was carrying so I scoped it with my 500mm lens. Even at that great distance it was obvious that the bird was carrying an egg. I actually fired off a couple of\u00a0photos but the curlew was so far away that I just deleted\u00a0those images\u00a0when I\u00a0arrived home. I wish I hadn’t now…<\/p>\n

I’ve seen and photographed birds carrying egg fragments from the nest after the hatching of their chicks\u00a0several times but this seemed a little strange because it looked like an entire egg rather than just a\u00a0 fragment\u00a0(which I didn’t think at all likely or even\u00a0possible). Another thing that strikes me as unusual is the fact that this bird was several hundred feet in the air and flew a long distance with the egg even though BNA Online says that\u00a0when curlews dispose of egg shells they carry them only “several meters” from the nest before dropping them.<\/p>\n

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\"curlew-egg-8194c-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

We watched as\u00a0the\u00a0curlew eventually landed on a gravel road\u00a0where we were able to find the abandoned egg. Here you see it undisturbed and in place\u00a0where we found it.\u00a0It seems apparent to me that this egg didn’t hatch. It doesn’t look like it has been pipped from the inside by the egg tooth of the chick and besides the hole in the egg is much too small for the chick to have emerged through it. In addition, some of the broken fragments held in place by the shell membrane seem to be “caved in” slightly\u00a0rather than “caved out” as you might expect with the emergence of a chick.<\/p>\n

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\"curlew-egg-8198b-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

I asked Mia to hold the egg while I took a few photos to give a sense of scale since\u00a0I was so\u00a0impressed by its very large size. I can hardly imagine a curlew having to lay an egg this large\u00a0– just the thought of it makes my sphincters pucker! And they typically lay four of them.<\/p>\n

It’s my suspicion that the contents of this egg were eaten by a predator in the nest and that the parent curlew instinctively removed it for sanitary reasons. If so\u00a0it reminds me once again of just how precarious successful reproduction often is in the wild.<\/p>\n

I was also struck by the shape of the hole in the egg. I see the outline of a small dog with a short erect tail looking away from me.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I’ve seen too many Rorschach ink blots…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We spotted a far off Long-billed Curlew in flight with something large in its bill.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,5,334,369,391],"tags":[31,121,208,724,3234,3233],"class_list":["post-44526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-long-billed-curlews","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-egg","tag-long-billed-curlew","tag-predator","tag-rorschach-ink-blots","tag-sphincter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/curlew-egg-8198b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-bAa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}