Swapped eggs...

[Externet]

Hi.

I was one eye half open, the other not; on midnight TV were showing a hen whose eggs where replaced with goose eggs while being incubated. Did anyone see such report and can explain details?

Later, the baby geese were following mom, never near water, and on a different diet.

What if hen eggs were incubated with mother goose; would the chicks be drawn to water by mom and drown?

Miguel

[Mokele]

Birds will incubate just about anything in the nest; some species are pickier than others, but not many are terribly bright about it. That's how the cuckoo gets away with other birds raising their babies, and why we give sandhill cranes eggs of the endangered whooping crane (they'll raise it fine and the whooping cranes will lay replacement eggs for those removed, massively increasing the breeding output of a given pair).

 

After hatching, many baby birds imprint on the first trigger of a particular stimulus, such as the first thing that feed them. If it's a goose, they'll imprint on the goose and consider it to be 'mom'. It even works if it's a human, which is why when hand rearing birds that will be released into the wild, keepers feed it via puppets made to look like the parent species.

 

Mokele

[Skye]

If chickens see they have eggs in their nest they lay more to create a clutch. If you have hens that aren't laying you can trick them into laying eggs by putting white plastic balls in there.