'Male' eagle owl lays egg at Gloucester bird sanctuary

25 June 2019

Staff at a bird sanctuary were shell-shocked when an eagle owl they had believed was male for 23 years unexpectedly laid an egg.

Kaln, who came to Gloucester's Barn Owl Centre as a chick in 1996, delivered its surprise on Sunday.

Founder Vincent Jones said: "You should have seen his face after he laid it. You should have seen our faces."

Kaln's sex had never been checked before as the bird was so healthy, Mr Jones said.

"The egg came as a massive surprise. He's now a tomboy," he said.

"His brother is still staring into the nest scrape in the ground confused to hell. He's now got a sister instead of a brother."

Mr Jones said although the egg was not fertilised and would not develop into a chick, there could be more as owls lay up to three or four at a time.

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Female age and laying order drive variation of egg quality in blue tits

January 7, 2019, Max Planck Society

Little more than 50 years after the German ornithologist Wolfgang Makatsch published his book titled No Egg Is Like Another (Kein Ei gleicht dem anderen), new research at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and the University of Hohenheim reveals exactly how right he was. The study describes for the first time the egg albumen and yolk proteomes—that is, all measurable proteins—of a common songbird, the blue tit. It shows that breeding females can fine tune their eggs' composition to the needs of their young.

The quality of an egg resides in its size and its composition. In all egg-laying species, larger eggs produce larger, more viable and more performant offspring, while specific egg components (such as antioxidants or antimicrobial proteins) can support offspring growth, development or immunity. Egg quality varies broadly in wild animals and can even vary within a clutch and induce differences among siblings. To understand what drives this variation, researchers have turned to a population of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) breeding in southern Germany. They measured the nutrient content of the eggs, as well as the individual concentrations of six carotenoids (adding three new compounds to the list of avian egg carotenoids) and almost 300 egg proteins, and explored how the complex composition of the eggs varies in the population.

Blue tits are small, socially monogamous songbirds that breed once per year. Females use the nutrients they acquire from their daily food to produce one egg per day until the clutch has seven to 15 eggs, and a total weight that often exceeds her own body mass. Such a reproductive endeavour is difficult to sustain, and larger clutches contain smaller eggs. Moreover, the capacity to acquire, synthesize and deposit egg nutrients varies among females, resulting in eggs with very different composition.

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U.K. Heat Wave Triggers Rare Flamingos to Lay Eggs for the First Time in 15 Years

None of the eggs were fertile, but conservation officials have hatched a plan to encourage the flamingos to breed again

By Brigit Katz

SMITHSONIAN.COM
AUGUST 13, 2018 3:17PM

A scorching summer heat wave has been sending things a bit topsy turvy in the typically-temperate U.K. Water supplies have been depleted, traces of ancient structures are cropping up in parched fields and demand for thirst-quenching beverages contributed to a beer shortage. Emphasizing just how high temperatures have climbed, a nature reserve in Gloucestershire, England announced last week that a hot spell prompted its rare Andean flamingos to lay eggs for the first time in 15 years, as Yonette Joseph of The New York Times reports.

With weather conditions mimicking their warm natural habitat, six Andean flamingos at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) Slimbridge were recently triggered to lay a total of nine eggs. The reserve said in a statement that the rare pink birds, which hail from the Andean plateaus of Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, are notoriously “fickle breeders and can go years without nesting successfully.” They usually lay just one egg, and when the climate isn’t favorable, they often do not breed at all. The ones at the WWT haven’t laid any eggs since 2003, when the weather was similarly hot, according to The Telegraph’s Sarah Knapton. The birds’ last successful breeding period was in 1999.

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World's Oldest Known Wild Bird Lays Egg at 67

Wisdom is a "beacon of hope" for the Laysan albatross, which faces threats such as ingesting ocean plastic.

  

By Christine Dell'Amore

PUBLISHED JANUARY 2, 2018

Wisdom, the albatross supermom, has done it again. At 67, the world's oldest known wild bird has laid an egg at her home on the Midway Atoll.

Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, return each year to the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to nest and raise a single chick. On December 13, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) confirmed the pair were incubating a new egg.

In her long life, Wisdom has outlived several mates and raised anywhere from 30 to 35 chicks. (See National Geographic's pictures of animal mothers and babies.)

  

She's also remarkable for having logged an estimated two to three million miles since 1956—or four to six round trips to the moon, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. (Related: "Albatross's Effortless Flight Decoded—May Influence Future Planes.")

"It's just unprecedented that we have a bird that we know of that's 67 years old and still reproducing," says Kate Toniolo, deputy superintendent for the marine national monument.

"It makes you wonder—could there be a bird two nests away from Wisdom that's even older?"

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