We had a little robin fall out of his next two days ago. Actually it fell out of my neighbor’s tree onto my driveway. Luckily, it was unhurt. But, then the whole neighborhood of kids was all over it! I had them set it in the flower bed while I rushed to the interwebs for answers.
#1 The thing about the bird smelling you or the baby losing it’s scent is a myth. Birds don’t have a great sense of smell anyway. Good thing, since all the little girls carried it around for ten minutes.
#2 Get the baby off the ground. We put ours in a hanging basket that we hooked on the neighbor’s basketball goal. See?
#3 Birds don’t feed the babies at night, but they do it about every 20 minutes during the day. So, keep an eye out (from very far away or inside the house) and see if one of the parents is visiting. Our baby definitely had at least one parent that came and went all of the next day.
#4 If the parents have re-established contact and you mess with the baby and she yells, the parents will go BANANAS on you. Stupid bird kept jumping out, so we keep adding more stuff to the basket. The baby got MAD when we moved her and the parents dive bombed me and apparently had the relatives over for dinner because there were 4 robins screaming at me. YIKES. I can’t lie. I was a bit traumatized.
Now, if for some reason you think that BOTH bird parents are DEAD, you can go to the bait shop and get some worms. Feed baby every 20 minutes all day long.
We rescued a few baby birds when I was a kid. Two of them lived and thrived and stayed with us for a few years each. We fed them a watered-down paste of fish food flakes (like Tetra Fin, for gold fish) – it’s all the same type of nutrition a bird likes (you know, bugs, worms, plant bits). Looks horrible, and smells like what it’s made of. But you can feed it to them with an eyedropper and they will greedily suck it up. 🙂 I can’t remember at all what we fed them when they were older. I guess the finch got birdseed and probably the blue jay too.
The jay escaped once, and we got a call from a neighbor. He said there was a weird blue jay in his tree that just didn’t seem completely wild and asked if it was ours. I don’t know how my dad got him to come back with him, but we got our bird back. Funny!
Well I hope you make the bird comfortable and release it to the wild when it is ready to fly. Make sure it’s all organic food. No MacDonald’s for the bird. 🙂
My family believes that a bird building a birds nest on your property is good luck and that is exactly what happened to me when I moved into my new house. Had to wait weeks until the bird was ready to fly before we could begin some renovations that was needed in the house. I wasn’t about to mess with some crazy superstition. Besides birds seem to make people softer, gentle and calmer.
I was watering a hanging basket on our back porch about a month ago and all of a sudden there was a big ruckus in the pot. A bird had made a nest in it and the basket had 6 baby birds in it! One of the babies kept jumping or falling out of the nest and I kept catching it and putting it back. Stubborn little cuss! Anyway, we watched all day and sure enough both parents came back and everything was fine! It was fun watching the parents feed the babies over and over again. Boy can those little guys make some noise! They have all flown away now and we really miss them!
The little guy looks pretty grumpy! Cute though! I remember on a trip to Argentina, a little baby bird fell out of his nest and we had him in a shoe box (with cushioning) with the lid open on the porch, and fed him worms that I dug out of the garden! His mom came to the rescue and fed him as well, and soon he was able to fly back to his nest!