What do you do when you find a baby bird on the ground? That was the dilemma I faced a couple of nights ago, when I found this tiny baby bird on the lawn of a neighbor’s townhouse.
Earlier in the week another neighbor had alerted me that there were baby birds in a tree a few doors down from my townhouse. I live in a suburban townhouse community and each of us has a postage-stamp size front lawn and a mandatory tree, mostly small crab apple trees. The baby birds were in a cavity of one such tree, a mere two feet (60 cm) above the ground and there seemed to be three or four babies.
When I returned home from work, I checked on the babies and suddenly heard a squawk. I looked down at my feet and saw one of the babies in the grass. There are all kinds of views about the advisability of putting baby birds back in a nest, but I was genuinely concerned that this tiny bird was in an incredibly vulnerable spot (among other things, we have some cats in the neighborhood).
A little fearful of doing it myself, I called my friend (and fellow blogger) Cindy Dyer, who was both willing and able to place the small bird back with its siblings in the cavity of the tree. Yesterday evening, I made a quick check of them and they seem to be ok.
I was mostly focused on dealing with the situation, but did manage to get a few quick shots of the little bird, which I can’t yet identify.
Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Mike Powell 
I’m glad you put him back, he probably just got nudged out by accident! Hope they all stay put til it’s time to leave the nest 🙂
I’ve always heard that mother birds will reject babies with human scent on them, but I always had a sneaking suspicion that the adults were just telling us that so we’d leave the nests alone. Now I know that my suspicions were accurate! I’m glad the little one survived.
Looks like it was mighty hungry. Probably a robin. They often nest near houses.
[…] I stalked the nest of the rescued baby bird featured in a posting last week, hoping to catch sight of its parents, I took this shot. Can you identify the bird from […]