Baby Bird I rescued and i need to know some things about it.

Question

I found this baby bird at my school and it had NO feathers what so ever and its eyes were still closed. Now the bird is about three weeks old and has a lot of feathers and it still wants me to feed it, but its MUCH much older now. I take it out to the tree in our backyard and it flys around and stuff. So its not much of a baby anymore. But im just wondering how to make it eat on its own and when to release it. ANY HELP?

Answer 1

Well, you will stil have to feed it the formula for 2 months a least. Then eventually feed it fruits, berries, and mealworms with theere heads cut off or they will eat the birds insides.

It will never learn how to feed on its own. YOu will have to feed it. It shoudlnt be released and forgot. It needs you to feed it the rest of its life. Leave bird seed, mealworms(heads cut off), and watermelon and banana pieces out on the porch.

Answer 2

First, congrats on your success! I know it can be very difficult to care for such a young bird.

You don't say what kind of bird it is--is it an insect-eater or a seed-eater? It's obviously going to be very difficult to teach an insect-eating bird to forage on its own, because in the wild it would be following its parents around and watching them hunt, and learning by their example. You can't really do this, especially without knowing what kind of bird it is since different species use different methods, but you also can't feed it seeds if it should be eating bugs. Chances are, the bird probably belongs to a native species anyway (unless it's a house sparrow), in which case it is illegal to keep it; you need to take it to a wildlife rehabilitator.

If it is a seed-eating bird, just keep a dish of seeds in the cage. It will eventually become interested in them and start to play around with them, and eventually learn to shell and eat them. This can take a few weeks, even a month, but you can't really "make" the bird learn this, it has to figure it out on its own.

Once it has switched to eating seeds on its own all the time, you can start taking it outside for longer and longer periods of time. On a warm night you can try leaving it outside, but make sure it is somewhere you can be sure it will be safe, like a screened porch--nocturnal predators like cats or raccoons won't hesitate to snatch a baby bird given the chance, even if it is "safe" inside a cage. Eventually you can stop using the cage altogether; once it's free the bird may stick around or it may go off to find a territory of its own. You can leave a bird feeder full of seed outside to make sure he has at least one dependable source of food.

If you need help identifying the bird, see if you can post some pictures up here. I'm sure we can figure out what it is.