Baby bird rescue

Over the past few months we have been watching the pair of pigeons that regularly visit our bird table. They have been busy preparing their nest and began to raise their two baby chicks.

Pigeons lay two eggs at a time, a day apart, then incubate them for three weeks until they hatch and feed them for another four weeks until they are fully grown. Pigeons feed their young on crop milk which mainly consists of regurgitated food and liquid from the crop.

One night we heard a commotion coming from the garden and the next morning we found the nest empty and broken and one chick hopping around the garden. It looked as if the nest had been attacked and the chicks had fallen out. The chick had most of it’s flight feathers but it’s wing appeared broken. Unsure how to help the it we rang the Vale Wildlife Hospital in Tewkesbury. We then caught the pigeon in a cardboard box and drove it to the wildlife hospital. Just after my mum returned from the two hour drive to Tewkesbury and back I found the second chick hiding in the opposite end of the garden. It looked uninjured and almost mature enough to survive by itself but could do little more to evade predators (namely our neighbours cats) other than flap around. Not wanting to make another trip to Tewkesbury we decided to take it in for the night and try to look after it.

The next morning we tried netting off the area around the bird table hoping that the parent pigeons would find it when they came to feed, however they completely ignored it despite it jumping up onto the bird table. The chick then flapped down rather inelegantly into the neighbour’s garden.

By the evening the chick had escaped and been recaptured several times but had still not been fed so we decided to ask one of our neighbours, who happened to be a pigeon fancier, for advice on hand rearing it. We had to wrap the chick in a towel and feed it water from a syringe, after it had drunk that we tried putting some of the softened seed we were given at the back of it's beak then holding its mouth closed to get it to swallow.

After a couple of days we tried leaving it outside in one of our cat carriers and the parents started landing on the cage and trying to feed it so we opened the top and the chick flew up into the tree and the mother finally started feeding it!

The next week we had another bird rescuing adventure when my mum found a stunned fledgling green woodpecker sat in the middle of the road and took it home We gave it some seed and fat balls and kept it in the cat carrier overnight. Next morning we took it into the opposite meadow and released it near the wood where it quickly flew up into the trees and began pecking away!