Male Incubation

[sirpavlos]

Please can somebody help me! Which male father sits on the egg until it hatches?

[Alphil_72]

Emperor penguins do I think.

[New Forester]

Emperor males do sit (or rather stand) on the eggs, but they take turns with the females.  The males of quite a few birds do this, sometimes sitting only at night when their gaudier colours are less of a problem.  In many other species (like the domestic fowl) only the hens sit.

 

I think that in emus it's the males which do all the sitting (incidentally the females are somewhat more brightly coloured than the males -- the eggs are a fetching dark green, about ten times the weight of a hen's egg).  I'm sure there are others where it's only the males.

 

[Cetti]

The female Emperor penguin leaves the male to do all the incubation for two months while she goes off to sea.

There is no nest so he rests the egg on top of his feet and rocks back on his heels to cover it from the fierce Antarctic winter.

 The Adelie male penguin - also from the Antarctic incubates for the first two weeks.

 

[New Forester]

Sirpavlos  --  Looking more closely at your question, I notice that "egg" is in the singular.  I think this means that the answer you're looking for may be the kiwi, which usually lays only one enormous egg at a time.  Until recently it was thought that only kiwi males incubate the egg (for up to 70 days -- compared with 21 days for a domestic hen).

 

In fact there are several species of kiwi, and in some the sexes do share the incubation:

http://www.kiwirecovery.org.nz/Kiwi/AboutTheBird/KiwiLifeCycle/Incubatingtheegg.htm

 

Cetti - You were right -- the male Emperor generally incubates the egg for the whole time and then passes the chick to the female.  However, it seems that if the female comes back early it's the egg he passes over:

http://www.whaletimes.org/emppeng.htm