If you’ve found a nestling: Help. First, look for the baby’s nest in the nearby bushes or trees if you find it, simply put the chick back and the parents will resume care. Photo: Tom Warren/Audubon Photography Awards If that happens, “they don’t know how to be a bird,” McMahon says.Īmerican Robin nestlings. Rescuing healthy fledglings is not only unnecessary, but it can be detrimental to their development. When raised by hand, she says, babies might confuse humans as their parents (not unlike the geese in the movie Fly Away Home). If you’ve found a healthy fledgling: “Walk away from the bird,” McMahon says. You can also distinguish age by movement: fledglings can hop, whereas nestlings might simply drag themselves on the ground by their bare wings. In other words, one looks like an awkward young bird, and the other kind of looks like a pink little alien. While fledglings are larger and covered almost completely in down and feathers, nestlings are small and typically naked-or with just a few fluffs. When you come across a rogue baby, first determine its age, McMahon says. To know when you should intervene-and how you can help if needed-ask yourself the questions below. Whether they fell or got pushed from their nest, they’re " not ready to go off into the world," s ays Rita McMahon, Co-Founder and Director of the Wild Bird Fund, a nonprofit animal rehab center in New York. Nestlings, on the other hand, are almost always in need of rescue. Of course, there is a chance that they could be injured, sick, or in danger, so there are some cases where a fledgling might require assistance. It's a normal part of a bird's development, and though these chicks might appear abandoned, they’re likely under surveillance by their parents nearby. ![]() Wandering from the nest is exactly what fledglings-which are just learning to fly-are supposed to do, she says. “Eighty percent of baby birds that come in have basically just been kidnapped,” says Melanie Furr, education director at the Atlanta Audubon Society and a licensed volunteer at Atlanta Wild Animal Rescue Effort. And this distinction is critical, wildlife rehabbers say, because most fledglings don’t need to be rescued. Like the vast majority of baby birds that people encounter, Bluego was a weeks-old fledgling-not a newly born nestling. As a child, I was thrilled to be on my way toward becoming a wildlife rescuer, but years later I wondered if it was the right thing to do.Īs I’ve learned, it probably wasn’t. She asked if someone in the class would care for it, and days later, the European Starling I named Bluego (for a reason I wish I remembered) was living in a cardboard box in my bedroom, padded with fake spider web left over from Halloween. In the third grade, my teacher found what she thought was an abandoned baby bird on the school grounds.
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