I was cleaning out the gutters tonight and came across a bird’s nest. There were five little eggs in there and I showed them to my daughter. I neatly placed them back in the nest and then I cleaned everything out, but left the nest so the little guys could hatch when it is time.
I told the neighbor, but he repeated the often heard meme that once you touch a bird’s nest, the mother bird can tell and she will abandon the nest and leave her unborn children to the vultures.
I call bullshit on that. Hell, my scent can’t last that long on the eggs. Has there been any research done on this or is this just one of these urban legends?
My computer is running slow, or I’d fish you some links, but a few weeks ago, my family and I displaced a nest and did a mad search on the intrawebs because of this rumor.
It’s false. What IS apparently bad is when you move the nest.
Urban legend. Birds, a few exceptions like vultures aside, have a truly lousy sense of smell. Some wary individuals might abandon a nest that visually looks like it has been heavily disturbed ( as if by a predator ), but otherwise it isn’t usually an issue.
You can touch bird eggs and the mother will hatch them. It wouldn’t have made much sense for people to remove one egg of endangered bird species for hatching and release in the past decades if the other eggs would have been left to rot by the female bird.
I can confirm from personal experience and what pigeon experts have said that it is bullshit. But the nest should not be moved to a new location, not even one nearby, as that does seem to confuse the parents and lead to abandonment. They picked a particular spot for a reason.
Good advice generally, but a friend of mine was able to do this. He found a Carolina Wren nest with four eggs in a wooden box in his shop, and it was going to be completely impractical to leave it alone until the young were fledged. So he moved the box in small steps, about 3 feet a day until it was outside the shop under the eaves. The birds took this in stride and brought off their brood without a hitch.
Or, more likely, that they are too stupid to realize that the other nest is their nest. Or, also more likely, they suspect that the nest has been moved by a predator which may or may not still be there.
Although the OP is about bird’s eggs, the “don’t touch it or its mother will leave it” meme gets applied to just about any kind of baby animal. Is is ever true?
Personal experience here, too. The other day I saw a baby thrasher (brown thrasher) on the ground near my deck. It either fell or was unsuccessful in its first flight. Probably the former. I found the nest and was finally able to capture the little devil and get it to stay in the nest. At first, it kept running away from me. When I first put it in the nest, it jumped out. It did that several times before it stayed put. Meanwhile, the mother was singing her head off nearby. After the baby was secured in the nest, the mother began to feed it. (She thanked me later that day by singing a melody for me outside my window.)
BTW, Wilson, my 6-year old cat, befriended the baby and protected it until I could get it. (Well, he didn’t really protect it, but he did befriend it.)
It probably was trying to learn to fly. Baby birds will commonly leave the nest (or be pushed out of it) before they can fly fully, but it’s all a part of learning to live on their own. The parents will continue to feed it until it can fly off and take care of itself. It has not been abandoned. The best thing to do, if there are no domestic predators around is to leave it alone. The parents won’t abandon it if you’ve touched it, though. They will continue to take care of it until it can go off on its own.
