***Data used in the analyses:*** **Supplementary Data 2.csv** | contains information about suborder, genus, family and tidal life-history of the studied species. **Supplementary Data 3.csv** | contains information about study populations: incubation monitoring system, mean female and male wing length, location of the study site and whether the location had tidal habitat used by birds for foraging. **Supplementary Data 4.csv** | contains metadata for nests, i.e. nest location, when the first egg was laid, when incubation started and ended. **Supplementary Data 5.csv** | contains metadata for birds, i.e. when caught and equipped with monitoring equipment, sex, and body size. **Supplementary Data 6.csv** | contains estimates of escape distances for all species (from literature, online survey and primary data), from which we calculated species median escape distance that we used in the analyses. **Supplementary Data 7.csv** | contains AIC and ΔAIC values of 191 regressions fitted to the incubation time-series for each of 584 nests (the regressions with ΔAIC = 0 were used as the nest’s estimated period length of the incubation rhythm). **Supplementary Data 8.csv** | contains starts and ends of 34,255 incubation bouts from 729 nests from 91 populations of 32 shorebird species.