Bird's Nest Question - Was fine, now abandoned....! PIC

[maple]

oh that sneaky cow bird!

 

[desertdarlene]

LOL on the cowbird egg.

I don't mean to be a downer, but cowbird eggs are actually protected and it's illegal to remove them from nests. I don't blame you, though, if I didn't know better, I would have done the same thing. It's heartbreaking watching a cowbird chick take over a nest and throw out the other eggs or chicks. Sometimes, though, the parents discover the egg and throw it out themselves.

Cowbirds actually developed this technique out of necessity of survival. They used to follow the herds of animals and relied on them to provide them with their diet of insect. If they stayed in one spot too long in order to raise babies, they would have starved to death as the herds would have moved on.

 

[whiteflare]

It's like something I read about cuckoos, was it? Where the cuckoo chick pushes the other eggs and birds out of the nest and is reared by a mother bird about half its size.

Oh, dear, I don't think the image is going to work

http://images.google.com/imgres?img...age=1&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0&tx=75&ty=115

I like this one.