wordsonbirds:

goddamnshinyrock:

Well, the unfortunate fact is that, if incubation is interrupted and temp drops during fetal development, the chick is probably not going to make it. It depends on the species and the time and the temperature, obviously, and I am not a birb development expert by any means, but if you’re not sure how long it’s been there… it’s probably a no-go. (I know from experience that fertilized chicken eggs can still hatch after several days out of incubation, but that’s at high summer temps, and chickens are not songbirds.)

if it’s dead or cracked, although it won’t become a bird, it will still provide a great source of food for other animals, so worry not, it will still be useful to nature! Just leave it where you found it and it will be scavenged by rodents, insects, or other birds! 

And generally the reason that eggs are on the ground is either wind or predation (if a predator is disturbed while taking an egg, it might drop it intact). 

It’s also possible that the birds pitched it from their nest as well. Whether it was because resources were tighter than they though and they need to conserve their energy for themselves or a host of other reasons birds will pitch their own eggs from their nests sometimes.

Sometimes that means they were incubating it for awhile and nothing happened, sometimes hat just means they weren’t cut out to be bird parents, sometimes they realize the particular egg is infertile and pitch it (not every egg in every clutch is fertile even with breeding pairs).

I would be less worried about the interrupted incubation and more worried about the impact the egg would have suffered from the fall. Even if the shell is intact the inside can be sensitive especially further in development. 

Typically there is nothing to do for eggs you find pitched on the ground but it’s not as big of a deal or as rare of an event as people think. It happens all the time really. Most of the time we just don’t notice the eggs before any scavengers do.

a good addition!