Puffins "rejecting" an egg? (1 Viewer)

[Puffins Burrow]

Hi,

We have been following the puffins burrow feed from the RSPB reserve on Coquet Island, Northumberland, UK.

The initial information from RSPB, estimated that the chick would hatch around the end of May, beginning of June.

However, no chick yet.

A couple of days ago, what looked like an egg appeared near the entrance to the burrow but there was still an egg in the nest.

Is it possible that the puffin could detect that, for whatever reason, the chick wasn't developing and to remove that egg from the nest and lay another?

The other egg seems to have been removed from the burrow now.

Hope someone can help.

Thanks

Link to the feed:

 

[Dave Boyle]

I'm not so sure about Puffins but other seabird chicks start calling from the egg a few days before they hatch so the adults can definitely tell if something's wrong - I work with a type of petrel & one pair fail every year, the chick dies just as its starting to hatch & the female abandons the egg on the day the egg is due to hatch. Other birds maybe aren't so smart & I have sometimes had to take an infertile egg away because the birds were still incubating a couple of weeks after it should have hatched.

Re-laying can happen in auks but not quickly, they need a couple of weeks to form a new egg, so the second attempts usually only occur if they lose the egg close to laying

Has the egg hatched yet? I watched the last 10 minutes of the video & it was still there at the end. Its a long time since I saw a Puffin egg but it looks flatter & more elongated than I remember Puffin eggs being