From: John De Armond
Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel
Subject: Re: Cats & Wild Birds
Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:47:27 -0400
Message-ID: <t8mqa2lbi80p0an5pvu2ehdup0mq0u3u81@4ax.com>

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:36:52 GMT, "Nadyne Nelson"
<nadyne@prospectiveplanning.com> wrote:

>No, it was definitely birds - starlings to be specific.  Maybe that's the
>only type of bird that won't come back for their young but the young man
>that took the nestlings told me not to ever touch a baby bird.  I assumed he
>knew what he was talking about.

That's an old wives' tale that has some tiny bit of  fact as the
basis.

Birds will almost never attend to a baby that has been placed back in
a nest but it isn't because someone has touched it.  The reason is
that most of the time, the mother has kicked the baby out for a
reason.  Animal parents, particularly birds, are brutally decisive
about an offspring that has something wrong with it.  Something that
we can't see just by looking.

This also explains why the attempts of weeping hearts to nurture a
reject almost always fails - there really was a reason for the squab
being kicked out of nest.  The best thing to do when a squab is found
on the ground is to do nothing and let nature take its course.

John