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As I understand it, a female can lay an egg before or
immediately after, but presumably not during, an observed copulation. I
take the question to be: how long after copulation does the female lay an
egg fertilised as a result of that copulation?
According to Gill's 'Ornithology' the laying of an egg after
fertilisation 'usually takes about 24 hours but may require a week'.
However, fertilisation is different from copulation. 'Normally, eggs are
fertilised within a few days of copulation, but some sperm remain viable for
weeks.' Moreover, female birds of some species apparently have the ability
to store sperm for up to ten weeks.
Members whose morality-and-good-taste defences did not allow
them to receive a recent message about looking at, er, those big whales with the
blunt heads will, I fear, have no chance of receiving the above scrap of
information, such as it is.
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