I saw this Egyptian goose with its chicks yesterday near my home in Amsterdam.

As a Dutch proverb has it, in mei legt elke vogel een ei (‘every bird will lay an egg in May’), but apparently the proverb is getting further and further from the truth these days. An ever warming climate seems to have caused many birds to lay eggs earlier in the year—Vroege Vogels says the average day a songbird lays an egg has moved 14 days forward between 1986 and 2011. The site also points out that songbirds need insects to feed their young and insects have started to become active earlier in the year.

Like the parakeets I mentioned a couple of months ago, Egyptian geese are intruders from much warmer climes, but a quick web search didn’t reveal any info on wintry egg-laying habits. Do any of our readers know if these birds always hatch their young in late February or early March?