Ours were doomed...doomed I say!
Good work on your housemartin!

My step da taught me to recognize the splayed legs indicating the chick was weak and could not support itself, probably due to being beaten nearly dead by some big bully sibling, or worse, its own parent.

These were all house sparrows, every last one died.

Some success with mynah birds, a lovely triumph but completely illegal in our area as they are protected as wild animals. We'd turn them over to the nearby "bird lady" who had a special dispensation from the Pope of Good Animal Care to take in wild animals. She once screamed at me to feed the mynah chick some dog food and put it back and stop touching it, the parents would get it to fly back up to the nest. She only stopped screaming at me when I told her I caught it in the pool, where it had tried to jump on my head as I was swimming. Bird brains...

I did have much success with budgies, cockatiels and parrots of all types. Raising 2 parrots and 11 baby cockatiels at once is my record.
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 22:31, Reply)