Care and Safety

I Found a Baby Bird

Almost every rescued baby bird did not need rescuing. One look at the feathers tells you which case you have, and the two cases have opposite answers.

From May to July, this is the most common wildlife question there is, and it has one of the highest rates of well-meant harm attached to it. The great majority of baby birds people find on the ground are healthy fledglings whose parents are ten feet away and irritated at you. Taking one home reduces its chances rather than improving them.

The whole page comes down to a single question you answer by looking at the feathers: is this a nestling or a fledgling? A nestling belongs in a nest and you should put it back. A fledgling belongs on the ground and you should walk away. Everything else follows from that.

This page covers how to tell them apart, why the fledgling window is only a few days long, how to return a nestling and how to build a substitute nest if the original is gone, the handled-chick myth, when a rehabilitator is genuinely necessary, what to do about a cat or a dog in the yard, and why you must not feed a baby bird. If the bird is visibly hurt rather than young, go to what to do with an injured bird instead.

Nestling or fledgling: read the feathers#

Do not judge by size, and do not judge by how loudly it complains. Judge by plumage and by what the bird can do with its feet.

The grip test is the most reliable single check. Hold a finger against the bird's feet: a fledgling clamps on, a nestling cannot. Juvenile plumage also confuses people at the feeder, since a young American robin is spotted, a young European starling is plain gray-brown with no gloss, and a young blue jay has a shaggy head. None of those is a bird in trouble.

The fledgling window is two to five days long#

Songbirds do not learn to fly in the nest. They leave before they can fly properly, spend roughly two to five days on the ground and in low cover being fed by their parents, and gain flight strength during that period. It is a deliberate strategy: a nest full of well-grown chicks is an obvious target, so scattering the brood across a yard spreads the risk.

That window is exactly when people find them. The birds are conspicuous, noisy, clumsy and apparently abandoned, and they are none of those last two things. A parent may be attending four or five youngsters in different directions and visiting each one every ten or fifteen minutes. Longer gaps are normal, especially if there is a person or a dog in the yard.

It is also the window with genuinely high mortality, which is upsetting but not a reason to intervene. Fledgling losses are a normal part of the season, and the useful response is habitat rather than rescue: dense shrubs, a brush pile and the cover described in a bird-friendly yard give fledglings somewhere to hide. Removing a fledgling from its parents' care almost always lowers its odds.

Putting a nestling back#

If the bird is naked or in pin feathers, it needs to be in a nest, and the original nest is the best one. Look up and out from where you found it: nests are often better hidden than you expect, in a shrub, a wall vine, a gutter, an eave, or a nest box you had forgotten about. A second chick or eggshell fragments on the ground point you at the right tree.

1. Check the bird over first. If it is cold to the touch, cup it in your hands for a few minutes to warm it before returning it, or it will not survive.
2. Look for the nest within about 20 feet (6 m) of where the chick landed, at any height.
3. Put the chick back in, right way up, and leave quickly. The whole operation should take under a minute.
4. Go indoors and watch. A parent returning within an hour means you are done.
5. If you cannot find the nest, or the nest is destroyed, build a substitute as described below.
6. If the chick is injured, has flies or maggots on it, or is cold and unresponsive after warming, call a rehabilitator instead.

Do not put a nestling in a tree, on a branch or in a shrub without a nest. It cannot grip, it will fall again, and the second fall usually does more damage than the first.

The scent myth#

You will be told that touching a baby bird makes the parents reject it. It is not true, and it has probably cost a great many chicks their lives, because it stops people doing the one thing that would help.

Most birds have a modest sense of smell and, more to the point, they identify their young by location and by begging calls rather than by odor. Parent birds are heavily invested in a brood they have spent weeks producing, and they do not abandon it over a human handling. Cornell's NestWatch program addresses this directly in its material on nesting myths, and nest monitoring itself, done to protocol, is a long-running research method precisely because careful visits do not cause abandonment. If watching nests interests you, citizen science for feeder watchers covers how NestWatch works.

What does matter is time and repetition. Handle the chick once, briefly, and leave. Repeated visits, lingering at a nest, or leaving a scent trail on the ground that a mammal can follow are real risks, and they are risks to the whole nest rather than to the one chick.

Building a substitute nest#

If the original nest has blown down or been destroyed, you can often rebuild in place and the parents will carry on feeding. This works well for open-cup nesters and it is worth trying before calling anyone.

1. Find a container with drainage: a plastic berry basket, a small wicker basket, or a margarine tub with several holes punched in the bottom. Drainage is not optional, because a chick sitting in rainwater will chill and die.
2. Line it with the original nest material if you can recover it, or with dry grass shaped into a cup. Do not use anything fluffy and synthetic, and see nesting materials for what is safe.
3. Wire or zip-tie it securely to a branch or the wall as close as possible to the original site, at a similar height, shaded from direct afternoon sun and sheltered from rain.
4. Put the chicks in, keeping any siblings together for warmth.
5. Withdraw completely and watch from indoors for an hour or two.
6. If no adult comes in that time, and the chicks are calling and alert, call a licensed rehabilitator.

A note on mourning doves: their nests are famously flimsy and often little more than a few sticks, so a berry basket wired under the original spot is a genuine improvement and dove parents accept it readily.

When a rehabilitator is genuinely needed#

There is a real list, and it is shorter than people think.

• The bird has visible injuries, blood, a drooping wing, or flies and maggots on it.
• It has been in a cat's or a dog's mouth, or a cat has batted it. This is always an emergency because of bacterial infection from saliva, even with no visible wound. See what to do with an injured bird.
• Both parents are known dead, for example after a window collision or a road kill nearby.
• It is a nestling, the nest cannot be found or rebuilt, and no adult has visited a substitute nest within a couple of hours.
• It is cold, limp and unresponsive after gentle warming.
• It has been sitting in the same spot for a full day with no parental visits at all.

Contain it in a ventilated cardboard box lined with paper towel, keep it dark, quiet and at room temperature, and call. The routes to a licensed rehabilitator, including your state wildlife agency's county list and the AnimalHelpNow service at animalhelpnow.org, are set out on the injured bird page. Call before you drive: rehabilitators run at capacity through the spring and summer.

Cats and dogs in the yard#

The single most useful thing you can do for a fledgling in your yard is remove the pets from the equation for a few days. Keep the cat indoors entirely, and put the dog on a leash for garden trips, or fence a section off. This is temporary and it is the whole intervention.

If a neighbor's cat is the problem, the same fledgling window is a good reason to talk to them, and it is a much easier conversation in June about a specific bird than in the abstract. Motion sprinklers, dense prickly planting near cover, and keeping ground feeding to a minimum during fledging all reduce the opportunity.

Never feed or water a baby bird#

This is where the most damage gets done by the most kindly intentioned people. Do not offer anything, not even water, and especially not while you wait for a call back.

• Bread does nothing useful and fills a crop that needs protein. The general case is in bread and kitchen scraps.
• Milk is worse than useless. Birds are not mammals, they do not produce milk and they cannot digest lactose.
• Earthworms dug from the garden can carry parasites, and a soft-bodied worm forced into a chick is a choking and impaction risk. Garden worms are not the same thing as the mealworms you would offer adult bluebirds.
• Water dripped into the mouth is inhaled rather than swallowed, because a bird's airway opens at the base of the tongue. Aspiration pneumonia is a common cause of death in rescued chicks.
• Pet-store seed, cat food and human baby formula are all wrong for a wild chick and species-specific diets matter. See what not to feed birds.

A healthy chick can go a few hours without food far more safely than it can survive one wrong feeding. Warmth, darkness and quiet are the only supportive care to give, and the rest is the rehabilitator's job.

The law, and the honest bottom line#

In the United States, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects nearly all native birds, along with their nests, eggs and young. Raising a wild songbird at home is illegal without a federal permit, and it is also very difficult to do well: nestlings of most species need feeding every 15 to 30 minutes through daylight hours on a species-appropriate diet. The introduced house sparrow and European starling are not covered by the Act, but a rehabilitator is still the right destination.

The honest bottom line is that doing nothing is usually the correct, difficult answer. Most grounded baby birds are fledglings, most fledglings have attentive parents you cannot see, and the best help you can give is an hour of watching from indoors, a cat kept inside for the week, and a yard with enough cover that a clumsy young bird has somewhere to hide. If you feed birds through the breeding season, the related question of what belongs in the feeders is in feeding during nesting season.