Posts tagged "baby birds"

Not all baby animals are cute from the moment of birth. Puppies and kittens for sure are adorable pretty much out of the gate. Birds, maybe not so much.

These cockatiels hatchlings are slightly creepy looking for their first few days of life. That said, they're still wildly entertaining to watch. And as the days pass and they fluff up into creatures recognizable as birds, things quickly get a lot cuter. Behold the first month in two cockatiels' lives.

Here are four parrot chicks, who make up a delightful rainbow while seated happily in tiny kitchenware. Look at the colors: greens, pinks, browns, yellows -- and when one squawks they all do! Indeed, they're so young, we're not even sure they've developed the instinctive ability to ask for a cracker, but their day will come.

Fifty-two barn swallows, sparrows, and one bluebird -- all of them babies -- were retrieved by authorities from the bedroom of a 15-year-old Colorado boy earlier this week. According to the Associated Press, only 13 of the birds have survived thus far, though they are expected to fully recover.

Seemingly with the best of intentions -- or at least with no intent to harm -- the teenager had taken the baby birds out of their nests around his Longmont neighborhood and attempted, along with the help of other neighborhood kids, to feed them in his room to no avail. According to the AP, "The boy had no explanation for raiding the nests." Police decided to ticket the boy for "cruelty to animals and interference with wild birds."

Kudos to the boy's mom for promptly calling the authorities as soon as she realized what was going on. The birds had been in his room for roughly 24-hours before authorities were called, which is why at least 13 will make it to adulthood.

Who's to say what his logic had been, but as said by Gabriele Paul, operations manager of Boulder, Colorado's Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, where the birds were taken, "Every once in a while, we get animals from people who mean well. They don't know it is illegal to do it themselves."

Perhaps there is a future, world-class veterinarian who will come out of this unfortunate story.