Do Mother Birds will reject their young one’s touched by humans?
We all know one thing perfectly that we should not pick bird’s chick in our human hands. But whenever you touch the baby bird and the mother bird will find it by smelling the residue of stinky human hands on their baby. These mother bird will leave their baby bird and it will there to die. This is what you think. right?
Wrong, says Miyoko Chu, a biologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Birds don’t have a very strong sense of smell ,” she said, “so you won’t leave a scent that will alarm the parent.”
In fact, in opposition to what our ancestors may have let us know, most parent birds are unrealistic to relinquish their chicks over a human fiddling.
“Usually, birds are quite devoted to their young and not easily deterred from taking care of them,” Chu said.
But before you put on your Bird Rescuer costume and start saving the day, Chu suggests you shouldn’t go around picking up every baby bird you see. Baby birds may look stranded when in fact their parents are hiding close by. In fact, it’s very common for young birds to leave the nest before they’re ready to hit the skies.
“If you back up and watch them,” Chu said, “in a lot of cases the parent will come back and feed the young and protect it.”
And your handling of the bird might be doing more harm than good, said Tom Hahn, an ornithologist at the University of California at Davis. “A bigger risk to the babies, if humans mess around with them, is that the activity of the human around the nest may attract the attention of predators, which may subsequently come get the babies,” he says
But, Chu said, if the bird is in a highly unsafe area, such as on a road or in a neighborhood full of cats, it’s fine to gently pick the baby up and put it back into its nest.
Source: LiveScience
