Rising Tide Images
Austere Nurture
With ingrained parental patience, a white tern incubates an egg in a small hollow on a tree branch. It briefly stood up to stretch and reposition a little giving me a barely visible glimpse through the feathers around the abdominal brood patch of the single brown and beige mottled egg balanced between its feet. The manu-o-Kū is an arboreal nesting pelagic seabird that doesn’t construct a nest; instead using a flat or hollow or fork in the tree to keep the egg from rolling away. It uses its strong clawed semipalmate feet to help steady the egg and perhaps to also provide incubation warmth. This one is nesting in a monkeypod tree adjacent to a building in urban Honolulu. After the egg hatches in about 35 days, the sexually monomorphic adults that have been alternating incubation duties will begin alternating fishing and feeding duties.
Austere Nurture
With ingrained parental patience, a white tern incubates an egg in a small hollow on a tree branch. It briefly stood up to stretch and reposition a little giving me a barely visible glimpse through the feathers around the abdominal brood patch of the single brown and beige mottled egg balanced between its feet. The manu-o-Kū is an arboreal nesting pelagic seabird that doesn’t construct a nest; instead using a flat or hollow or fork in the tree to keep the egg from rolling away. It uses its strong clawed semipalmate feet to help steady the egg and perhaps to also provide incubation warmth. This one is nesting in a monkeypod tree adjacent to a building in urban Honolulu. After the egg hatches in about 35 days, the sexually monomorphic adults that have been alternating incubation duties will begin alternating fishing and feeding duties.