A couple of small birds have built a nest under the roof of the back porch, about a dozen feet from the door. I go out on the porch late at night to take the garbage out, and at other times during the day, but I hate to destroy their nest because I don’t know if there’s many other places in town (not many trees) and there may be eggs already there. Will they wind up killing the chicks because of proximity to humans anyways? Any ideas on whether to destroy the nest or not?
They won’t kill the chicks because humans are nearby. We’ve had quite a few nests on our house. If there are eggs in it I wait until the chicks are gone then get rid of the nest.
It won’t be long before they’re gone. At least for the birds that nest on my house. They may be back next year though.
Location not given (and not in the profile either): assuming you are in the eastern US, it’s probably wrens, which often use human-made housing and objects to nest in. Why are you in such a hurry to get rid of them? When they fledge the entire family will be going through your garden Terminating every creepy crawly they see (and wrens tend to have large broods). And the old wives’ tale about touching the nest, eggs, or young causes the parents to abandon them is just that.
Aside from them possibly being something like house wrens (guess how they got that name), birds sometimes choose to nest in proximity to the home base of a large, dangerous critter that is nonetheless unlikely to hunt them (possibly due to being too small to be worthwhile for the predator) because the large predator will tend to discourage the presence of smaller predators more likely to go after birds or their young.
The birds knew you were there when they built the nest. Keep to your normal routine and they’ll keep to theirs.
There’s a name for that category of behaviour, I think, but it eludes me - commensalism of some sort, but I thought it had its own name.
To the OP: the interval between eggs hatching and offspring leaving the nest is, for most small birds, a matter of a few weeks, so if you are intending to remove the nest, it shouldn’t be too long a wait until you can do it without causing harm. Some species lay a second clutch of eggs in favourable seasons though, so watch out for that.
Okay, due to the brevity of the hatch and the fact that they probably already have eggs, I’ll just leave it be, but it is a very inconvenient location because I can’t use the porch. As I said, the nest isn’t far away from the door and any time I go on it, the birds break into a frenzy flying around the porch like I’ve intruded on them. Birds in the past have nested on the house rooftop which wasn’t a problem at all.