So you rescued a baby bird. Now what?

It is early May and you might find baby birds on the ground. Fallen from their nests. (I'm not sure when wild bird eggs hatch, so this article might come in handy. )

If you do, find such a baby bird, what do you do?

1. You could try to find its nest and put it back.
2. Take it home/ to the vet to see if it's OK - no broken wings or legs
3. Do nothing, let nature take its course. [do you have the heart for that? i don't]
4. Something else this author didn't think about. [care to share your thoughts?]

I only asked "what will you do" and not "what and why." I like to assume that most of us would try and find the bird's nest and try to put it back. We all know baby birds don't belong on the ground. Many would choose to do both option 1 and 2.  And there are quite a handful who would choose the last 2 options, for various reasons.

Saying that doing one or the other is wrong or good - this is actually something we can't be objective on. We were all raised differently and have different beliefs.

However, I will tell you what I did, and what my experience was. You can then decide if this was the right or the wrong thing to do.

About 3 years ago I found a baby grey crow on the ground, next to my building. It was a rainy spring, and the poor thing was soaked. His parents were still watching over him, but couldn't do anything about him - there were just too many humans around for them to risk getting down on the ground and feed him or protect him from the rain.

He couldn't protect himself from the cold pouring rain either because he was bald, only his tail and wings feathers were grown. He would have died if I didn't decide I would take him in, feed him, and warm him up.

I took him in and decided the first thing he needs is to get warm up. I grabbed a towel and proceeded to dry him off, except it didn't really work. The hairdryer did a better and faster job.

The bird was now dry and warmer. But weak. Because he didn't eat in several hours.

WARNING: Baby birds need to eat about once an hour or two. But you need to learn how to feed them because YOU are now the parent!

Learning how to feed a baby bird is rather easy, but if you worry easily, ask someone else to do it. You can find many instructions online, but I will try to explain in a future post how to feed baby crows!

Must tell you Romanian vets are not very experienced with birds, and I had 2 of them telling me he would die because they didn't know what to do to him. Guess what? he didn't die. I had to force some antibiotic on him the next day - he caught a cold from the rain. The worst part was that he could have died at my hands because I only had some strong antibiotic for humans [I used it for a UTI before... so go figure].

Of course I made sure to only give him a tiny bit, trying to figure out about how much based on his weight and to complicated measurements and math calculations on the pill. Fun times! I should be a chemist now, or a vet. The good news is that it worked and the next day he was walking all over the floor.

© Charly Cross 2013 - present. All rights reserved.