Precocial: Male wood duck (left), female wood duck and its independent hatchlings (right). This is because if a bird chooses to incubate its eggs less, the incubation temperature drops, extending the time needed for incubation. You may find this interesting: the amount of attention the parent birds give to their eggs actually affects the incubation time, thereby affecting the hatch duration required! Birds that choose to neglect their eggs actually cause a LOT of variability of hatch durations between species. Īltricial: American Robin feeding its helpless hatchlings In addition, birds also occasionally rotate the eggs to ensure that none of them cool. The average clutch size, as it turns out, does NOT seem to be correlated with the average hatch duration of the species! Scientists have actually found that birds with larger clutches would simply compensate by spending more time incubating the eggs in their nest than others with smaller clutches. What’s interesting is that if we look into the trends, (and scientists also agree on this) the hatch duration of bird eggs does not vary by more than a few days within its own species. There are some birds whose eggs hatch very quickly, such as Northern Cardinals with an average of 12.5 days, but there are also those that take a long time for their eggs to hatch, like Wood Ducks, which take an average of 40.5 days to hatch. Now we can clearly see that birds have very different hatch duration, and some of them vary by a lot. Here’s a table to sum up hatch duration, average clutch size, and egg-laying month for some bird species: Bird Species Did you enjoy playing around with the tool I made? Now let’s dive into more interesting details you can learn from using the tool: the difference in egg hatch duration among bird species! Not all birds are built the same as they have very distinct physiological differences which require different hatch durations.
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