What is a dummy egg?

Hello again! It’s Josh from Zoo Atlanta’s Bird Department. After being a keeper for over a decade, I have added words and phrases to my vocabulary that definitely didn’t exist before. At least not in the context that animal care professionals use them in our daily lives. Words like howdying, internal pipping/external pipping, and fledgery (this one may in fact be just a Zoo Atlanta specific).  This jargon sometimes comes out during my interactions with our Zoo guests.  Just last week while checking a pied pigeon nest, I used the phrase dummy egg and had a group of very confused guests. If that group of guests got to learn about dummy eggs, I figured I might as well share with our digital followers as well.

A dummy egg is simply a fake egg that replaces a real egg in a bird’s nest. I have used various forms of dummy eggs throughout my career. Here at Zoo Atlanta, most of our dummy eggs are real eggs that we have emptied and refilled with plaster.  With our Chilean flamingo flock, we use fake eggs made from clay that do that job.

We use dummy eggs for a few different purposes. Sometimes, we do not trust that the egg will be properly cared for during the incubation period, so we will replace the real egg with a dummy and take the real one to be artificially incubated. Once the chick hatches, we will often just swap the dummy egg out with the chick, and the parents take over from there! The other, more common, use of the dummy egg is to prevent overlaying. Laying eggs is very taxing on a bird’s body. In situations where we may not want to breed a bird, we will still allow it to sit on the dummy eggs to prevent her from continuing to unnecessarily lay eggs.

Josh M.
Keeper III, Birds