Try to put it back in the nest I guess, although the mother likely wouldn't accept it anymore.F1_2004
I've often heard that if you touch either an egg or a baby bird, that the mother won't accept it any more since it has the stink of humans.
And to be honest, I am VERY skeptical about that. I don't buy it. I think it's an urban myth. If there was any kind of basis in that (at least for most birds), then it's doubtful that the cuckoo bird could exist. Cuckoo birds have their whole survival strategy around finding the nest of another species of bird, kicking an egg out of the nest, and then laying an egg in its place. The cuckoo egg looks noithing like the other eggs, but the mother of the other eggs still hatches it. The baby looks nothing like the other babies, and proceeds to murder the other babies until the invader is the only baby in the nest. And then, even when the baby is twice the freaking size of the mother, the mother still barfs into its mouth as if she doesn't realize that she's raising a monster.
And the thing is, that wouldn't happen if the mother bird had any idea. We're talking about a bird being tricked into raising a completely different species of bird, and this all could have been stopped if the mother was able to recognize that the cuckoo egg/baby wasn't her own egg/baby.
When people say "don't touch it, or the mom will abandon it", I think that people are VASTLY overestimating the ability of birds to even know what their own ****ing eggs look/smell like.
But then look at it from a different perspective. I've known people who raised certain birds (ducks/chickens/geese/parakeets). Often these people HAVE touch either the eggs or the babies, and I have never ONCE seen a case of the mother abandoning the egg/baby. Even in cases where the mother can clearly SEE a person touching the egg/baby, the bird still accepted the egg/baby after the human left it alone. Hell, I once saw a duck and a goose share THE SAME NEST. Somehow, the goose and the duck laid eggs in the nest, and BOTH of them started incubating ALL of the eggs. Here's how it worked. The goose would sit, and the duck would stand around upset because there's a ****ing goose sitting on its nest. Eventually though, the goose would have to leave in order to eat. At which point the duck would sit and incubate goose eggs. At which point the goose would later come back, see a duck sitting on its eggs, and get EXTREMELY pissed off. But the bottom line is that these were two completely different species and they couldn't even decide who the NEST belonged to, let alone an egg. They look into they nest, and all that either of them sees is "lots of eggs, and I guess they must be mine". If you happen to have a nesting chicken and a nesting duck, and then completely switch out one egg, here's what I expect...that if the swapped duck egg hatches, that it's going to get raised as a chicken, and vice versa.
Of course, I'm not saying that that applies to ALL birds, but I think it applies to LOTS. And when it comes to the birds that are pretty good at recognizing who their babies are, I suspect that they are good enough at recognizing who their babies are that they won't simply kill their own baby simply because you touched it. When it comes to the "don't touch an egg/baby or else the mom will abandon it", I strongly suspect that this is like the whole "the average person swallows ten spiders during their lifetimes, in their sleep". It sounds like something that someone just happened to convincingly say, and then suddenly everyone started believing it. And I also suspect that if you ever see a fallen egg or baby, and know which nest it came from, that the best thing you can do is to put it back into the nest. I seriously doubt that most birds actually give a ****.
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