Thread by @GomezSerrano_MA

Incubation in the #Anthropocene
Or "The bird that mistook its eggs 🥚🥚 for a plastic container"
🙄 This is its story: ⬇️ Thread ⬇️

This Kentish #plover pair incubated a nest of two eggs 🥚🥚 for 22 days, until it was preyed upon by a fox 🦊. But the fox left a strange "egg" 🧐 inside the nest. The female has continued to incubate it for weeks. In #albuferadevalencia

At the beginning of May 2021 the Kentish plover female laid 2 eggs. 🧐 Can you spot them in this photo? Some pairs are able to camouflage them very effectively.

A few days later they incorporated a peculiar third "egg" 🥚, which seemed lost outside the nest: a plastic container of liquid nicotine of French origin that the sea deposited there (see previous photo) 🙄
@ST0Pplastic #zeroplastics #plasticpollution #stoptheplastics

Days later, the wind 🌬️🍃 buried the plastic container with sand. The nest had two eggs again for a week, which were incubated normally.

On its 22nd incubation day the nest was predated by a fox 🦊. But the wind had once again modified the scene, this time removing the sand and bringing out this peculiar ... "egg" 🥚 again.

So this Kentish plover female decided to continue incubating her last "egg", adding nest materials in order to camouflage and thermoregulate the egg (protecting it from excessive insolation), rotating it and defending it with its characteristic distraction displays.

The male has not collaborated in incubation and has created courtship nest scrapes around the current nest, perhaps to convince her of her mistake and to start a new clutch. One of these nest scrapes is only 5 cm from where she incubates the plastic recipient (see green arrow):

This footage shows the Kentish plover male crouching over this same courtship scrape, to show it to the female, a common courtship behavior in the species. Without much success apparently

👀 So this Kentish plover female has been incubating a French plastic container of liquid nicotine for a month, convinced that one day the only egg that survived the predation of its nest will hatch 🐣.
Better to live with #zeroplastics #stoptheplastics #plasticpollution
⬆️🧵🎥⬆️

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