Mother Birds Abandon Their Babies

Mother Birds Abandon Their Babies

Brood parasitism is a well-known phenomenon in the birds’ world. It’s basically about birds relying on other organisms to raise their own children. Shortly, they abandon their own babies by manipulating the host to raise its young as if it were its own.

Birds push babies out of the nest

For most species, there nests are used once and only once, for the sake of breeding, they will start to build a nest, lay eggs in it, incubate it, hatch it, brought the chicks to an age old enough to fledge and they will all abandon the nest after that. (Nests are static and dangerous for birds to stay in for long duration of time, if a predator finds their nests, they are doomed, so they will have to minimize the stay as much as possible)

For some species, they might not want to rebuild a new nest again for the next breeding cycle, but to avoid being too easily exposed by staying in a same location, they build a few nests in the vicinity and rotate to use a different one during every breeding cycle. They will usually repair the nest a little before reusing. (I had personally recorded Striated Herons using such breeding strategy, this reduces the chances for species to be easily noticeable for going back to the same spot over long period of time, and it does not require efforts to build from scratch again every time)

For large species with relatively few predators, many are predators themselves, they might have a permanent nest that they will reuse every season to breed, for example some bird of prey and storks. They however usually do not stay in the nests outside of the breeding season.

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