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Okay, today I was out at a friend’s house and the kids come and report a baby bird on the ground.
Go investigate, yep..brand new, still has her egg tooth baby sparrow on the ground, with barely any fuzz on her. Poor baby, I can’t find the nest she was flung out of, we’ve been having hell winds all week. Anyway the poor thing was chirping and beggingm little yellow mouth wide open.
So I brought her home, investigated how to care for her and am now a surrogate mommy to a sparrow. She’s eaten pretty good so far, and is curled up asleep in my bra atm, hey…it’s warm there!
the biggest worry now is how to keep her fed and warm while I am sleeping or at work..she needs fed every hour or so…
Kyrin
Kyrin wrote:Okay, today I was out at a friend’s house and the kids come and report a baby bird on the ground.
Go investigate, yep..brand new, still has her egg tooth baby sparrow on the ground, with barely any fuzz on her. Poor baby, I can’t find the nest she was flung out of, we’ve been having hell winds all week. Anyway the poor thing was chirping and beggingm little yellow mouth wide open.
So I brought her home, investigated how to care for her and am now a surrogate mommy to a sparrow. She’s eaten pretty good so far, and is curled up asleep in my bra atm, hey…it’s warm there!
the biggest worry now is how to keep her fed and warm while I am sleeping or at work..she needs fed every hour or so…
Kyrin
I did this with a newborn chick we named Chi. From day one. Don’t attempt this unless you have had experience handfeeding baby birds before, or if you don’t have an entire day to dedicate to it. I had to take Chi to work and feed her every 15 minutes. Luckily I worked at a petstore at the time so my manager allowed it. I kept her on a heating pad on low under a kritter keeper lined with paper towels. I got a 1cc syringe from the on side vet, broke off the needle and discarded it properly (sharps) and made a liquid mix of parrot handfeeding formula and high protien soft kitten food. When she was new I had to feed her every 15 minutes by placing the syringe into her throat and squirting it directly into her crop the way the momma would. Knowing exactly when to stop takes practice, and the formula must be a specific temperature or crop infections can result. The crop should be full but not overlyfull. Also the food must be the right consistency or it can cause blockages on exiting the crop. You also must be very careful not to aspirate the chick or get food into the trachea or she’s a goner. 🙁
Eventually you’ll get down to one hour, then every two… and eventually you can work onto solid foods. It’s very easy to malnourish them even if they are eating well, which will cause other problems.From sunset to sunrise you do not need to feed the chick. But be prepared to get up at the crack of dawn and go to bed well after dark if you don’t allredy 😉
The chick’s best best is with a wildlife rehabber if you can find one that will take her!
Volunteer mod- I'm here to help! Email me for the best response: nambroth at gmail.com
My art: featherdust.comPoor thing! Let us know how she does….I wish I knew more about them but the smallest creature I’ve ever dealt with were some 2 day old kittens some college student had found and been ignorant enough to give a flea bath…..they died…but we fought for about a day trying to save them…My husband and I took shifts.
Hi Kyrin
feel free to PM me if you need help or have questions
I’m a wildlife rehabilitator by the way 😀I just did the same thing, but mine was older. I ended up getting it back to the parents, too, so mine had a happy ending. They have to eat all the time!!!
For others who didnt know this (Cuz I didnt): A birds mom will not abandon it if you touch it. That is an old wives tale. Birds have a poor sense of smell and a strong maternal instinct. They say if it has feathers, to leave it alone. Its a fledging and the mom will continue to feed it on the ground. If its real young (Like the one above) to put it back in the nest if possible, and if not, but it in a box with tissues and attach it to the tree as close to the nest as possible. I learned this from wildlifehabitat.org… or somthing like that 😉
we did that too, he was a bird bigger then a sparrow and native to this area. he was a little bigger then a baby too and was not as needy, he just could not fly yet. so we kept him in a bird cage next to our budgies and taught him how to fly in our sunroom. feeding him was fun. we would give him mealworms and he would just make the funniset chirpy sounds when he saw them. after he was flying ok, we released him.(the budgies were scared of him)
Egg tooth? Dear lord that is way too young, poor thing!
Are you sure it’s a sparrow? As in the forigen house sparrow? Because if it isn’t, it may be illegal for you to be raising the poor little thing. : US laws are kinda diffuclt that way in the fact that a) baby birds at that young an age are so hard to tell apart and b) well…who doesn’t want to try to rescue a poor helpless baby? Yet the laws are in place just because it’s next to impossible to raise a baby bird. Even for a rehabber. Not to sound all doom and gloom, but that’s just the way it is. 🙁
And THANK YOU Ski for clearing up those old wives tales. A lot of baby bird’s lives would be spared if idiots didn’t think fledgling robins that are already able to explore out of the nest need to be “rescued” or that a baby is doomed if a child touches it. 😕
KoishiiKitty wrote:we did that too, he was a bird bigger then a sparrow and native to this area. he was a little bigger then a baby too and was not as needy, he just could not fly yet. so we kept him in a bird cage next to our budgies and taught him how to fly in our sunroom. feeding him was fun. we would give him mealworms and he would just make the funniset chirpy sounds when he saw them. after he was flying ok, we released him.(the budgies were scared of him)
Oh yes! It’s much easier to help out an older bird that can take solid (wiggly) foods. 🙂
I’ll ditto rockerbot though- in the US, native species are illegal to have or own without a permit. In some localities, even the non native species are protected. Check with your local game and wildlife department fo find out. 🙂
Volunteer mod- I'm here to help! Email me for the best response: nambroth at gmail.com
My art: featherdust.comHeh, don’t get me wrong, when I was young I read Jean Craighead George’s books, and often they were about kids who raised baby birds. I wanted to do that so badly. 🙁 Then when I grew older and read things on real life situations (especially when the baby mockingbird was at our house) I just disappointed to not only find out it’s illegal, but that unless you really don’t know what you’re doing it’s a bad idea.
Now, if I remember correctly, Nam has worked at rehabs, so I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. XD
We did an odd thing with the food for our baby mockingbird, but it worked. It was dogfood and eggs and vitamins, as a site we hurridly pulled up suggested (in case you’re wondering what happened to the mockingbird, he was a victim of our dog…no serious injuries…just shock, but the ants getting to the wound made us worry). We were keeping it in a plastic bag, and my mother snipped off one of the corners to make a makeshift piping bag, and she would squirt out the food into the baby’s huge gaping yellow mouth. Looked pretty wormlike coming out. XD Maybe it was just silliness on my mom’s part…but the mockingbird seemed to like it. 🙂
Unfortunately, though she made it through most of the night, she somehow escaped her nestbox and flopped herself into the middle of the livingroom. Since she had no feathers and the house was only around 65 degrees or so, she got too cold and expired.
My husband found her when he woke up in the morning. I had to be at work at 3am, so I wasn’t there.
I was really disappointed, even though I knew she was going be a lot of work, I was so hoping we’d manage to raise her successfully, I never would have thought she would have been able to lever herself out of that box, but she must have. She was pretty strong.
Kyrin
Sorry you lost your baby bird! 🙁 Amazing how quickly we become attached to little critters.
Just a quick note to add to Ski’s: the most likely reason behind the old wive’s tale of the mom rejecting a replaced baby bird: often older/stronger siblings will push the weakest baby out of the nest and when people pick up the baby & put him back in the nest, the sibs will just oust him again. Sometimes I think my eldest would do that too, if she could get away w/it.Kyrin wrote:Unfortunately, though she made it through most of the night, she somehow escaped her nestbox and flopped herself into the middle of the livingroom. Since she had no feathers and the house was only around 65 degrees or so, she got too cold and expired.
My husband found her when he woke up in the morning. I had to be at work at 3am, so I wasn’t there.
I was really disappointed, even though I knew she was going be a lot of work, I was so hoping we’d manage to raise her successfully, I never would have thought she would have been able to lever herself out of that box, but she must have. She was pretty strong.
Kyrin
Oh, that is sad. At least you saved her for a day or so. 🙂purplecat wrote:Poor thing! Let us know how she does….I wish I knew more about them but the smallest creature I’ve ever dealt with were some 2 day old kittens some college student had found and been ignorant enough to give a flea bath…..they died…but we fought for about a day trying to save them…My husband and I took shifts.
Biggest mistake people make with cats is flea dip poisoning.
Never ever give a cat Defend (TM) that stuff is only for dogs and will kill a cat, and has. I worked for a vet for 2.5 years and we saw many flea product poisonings with cats, most were from use of Defend, or Adam’s flea products.
We fought one time for over 2 weeks to save a pair of cats the owner had put Defend on, they both died, and it was a really miserable way to go. We did all we could, but it just wasn’t enough.
I pretty much tell everyone who will listen to only use Frontline for cats, or Advantage, because nothing at the pet store is really very safe.
Kyrin
😥 poor little thing– Kudos to you for trying though, the world needs more kindness.
Good advice about the flea dip. Another care item you don’t want to go cheap on is vaccines. Years ago I bought some generic vaccines, with 7 to 10 cats most of the time, I need to vaccinate them myself. Well one old girl went into anaphylactic shock on me because of the generic. That turned into a nasty vet bill and I learned a scary lesson. Luckily Rosie was OK and I haven’t had any more problems with the vaccines, no more generic.
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