Baby joy as penguin egg discovered at Natureland Skegness

By CarolineW_LE  |  Posted: December 05, 2014

• The penguin egg
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  Popcorn the penguin with her egg
  
  
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  The penguin egg
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  Popcorn the penguin with her egg

A pair of penguins at Natureland Seal Sanctury in Skegness have produced an egg, to the delight of staff. Parents, Pip and Popcorn the Jackass Penguins, who were both born at the sanctuary had been showing signs of mating behaviour and on Friday morning an egg was found.

The director at Natureland, Duncan Yeadon, said: "It's very exciting news. We had noticed over the last couple of weeks they had been gathering little stones about and making a nest. "And they'd been making the typical mating call sounds as well - it sounds like a donkey, that's why they get the name Jackass Penguin." Mum Popcorn, is three years old and dad, Pip, is 26 but Duncan said this is not an unusual age gap in the penguin world.

The Penguin Egg

The sanctuary has not successfully bred penguins for three or four years. Duncan added: "Last year we had one egg but it didn't come to anything unfortunately so we are all keeping our fingers crossed this time." And he said that penguins will usually lay two eggs in total so another could well follow in the next couple of days.

The egg incubation period for penguins is around 35 days so if successful the sanctuary could be celebrating a new arrival in the new year. Duncan said: "The mum will feed the baby on regurgitated fish. In the wild once the baby is big enough the mum would leave it but here we will take it away once it's old enough to be independent and we will teach it to feed on fish then when it knows what it's doing we will return it to the group with the mum."

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