Like other tinamous, the white-throated tinamou eats fruit off the ground or low-lying bushes, as well as invertebrates, flower buds, tender leaves, seeds, and roots. Courting birds raise their thickly feathered rump and display their brightly coloured undertails. 5. He spends the next 17 days sitting on the eggs and keeping them warm. Eggs are one of the most nutritious foods in the world. Tinamous are resident in their habitats — they do not migrate like many other birds. A spectroscopy test also revealed that the blue eggs were iridescent (the green and brown eggs were too shiny for the spectrometer to accurately measure). The eggs are not camouflaged despite the risk of predation. [2] It was first described by Austrian ornithologist August von Pelzeln in 1863. But chemical analysis found pigments no different from those of other birds. They usually nest high in trees where few predators can reach; some build elaborate nests that are hard to break into. But the eggs are strikingly different. You can cancel anytime. However, the shell pigments fade when exposed to light. Once she has been fertilised, the female lays about three eggs in five or six days. [4], All tinamous are from the family Tinamidae and members of the infraclass Palaeognathae. They’re also marked with distinctive patterns of spots and splotches, which help murre parents pick out their own eggs from everyone else’s in their dense nesting colonies. Eggs from tinamous being used for research at Hunter College.

Finally, the team dissolved the cuticle using an acidic solvent, and found that the gloss and iridescence disappeared, leaving it duller than a chicken egg, though still vibrantly colored. The structure of the bony palate, an important feature in the taxonomy of ratite birds, quite clearly links the two groups, as does DNA and protein analysis. 2. This photo is from Kai Cabunoc-Boettcher, a previous volunteer at Finca Bellavista. For hundreds of years, man has developed a fantastic relationship with specific animals and have become the caretaker of these creatures throughout their life.