The incubation period is from 29 to 30 days. Only the female sits on the eggs, while the male carries the watch nearby. When a female leaves eggs, making a daily break for food, bathing and feather care, it is replaced by a male.
However, he can not sit eggs, since he has no spot on his stomach – a warm patch of skin that the female presses against the eggs to warm them. Like other swans, the chicks of the small swan are covered in light-gray down, they are fed by both parents, they grow faster than other swans. At the age of about 45 days they can already fly.
Usually this period falls on the middle of August, and a little later in the habitat of a small swan in the Arctic zone, a freeze begins, and birds should go to the south. Food: small swans look for their food mainly in water, they feed on roots and sprouts of aquatic plants.
In the severe northern climate, they need large areas of land to feed themselves, so here they do not tolerate any other swan families. The small swan is active both during the day and at night. During the flight, they like to rest on flooded meadows, where they pluck the grass.
Along with this, they can pick up food from the surface of the water with characteristic movements. Often small swans roam the silt, moving it and picking up the edible parts of the plants that come up here. If the water is quite deep, they dive, head down. These birds are not as strict vegetarians as other swans, they can eat large amounts of mollusks with thin shells.
