Living with Birds 21 Facts on Young Birds Tweetapedia
21 Wildlife Facts on Young Birds
May 15th, 2025
3 minute read
- The chick of every species has a distinctive pattern or colour to its wide-open mouth to help parents target hungry mouths in the nest.
- Blue tits and great tits coincide the hatching of their broods with the peak numbers of caterpillars. In southern England this is late May.
- A blue tit chick will eat as many as 100 caterpillars a day - that’s just one mouth to feed in a brood that’s often over ten.
- Down feathers trap air close to the skin and help to insulate the vulnerable chicks against extremes in temperature - it’s the original duvet.
- The technical word for a nestling is pullus, from the Latin for young chick, and usually refers to a bird still covered in down.
- Fledgling cuckoos never meet their parents, migrating to tropical Africa some weeks after the adult birds.
- Swift nestlings can survive for long periods without food if their parents get held up in bad weather. They become torpid to save energy.
- Pigeons and doves produce a milk-like substance in their crops to feed their squabs in the first weeks of life. It's rich in proteins and fats.
- The chicks of waders, waterfowl and game birds leave the nest within hours of hatching, never to return.
- Fledglings are highly vulnerable to predators when they leave the nest, and many are killed in the first few weeks.
- Only 20% of birds such as song thrush will survive to breed themselves. 2% are lost each day in the two weeks after fledging.
- Fledgling auks, such as guillemot and razorbills, leave the nest before they can fly.
- Broods of shelduck ducklings will gather together in large creches.
- A pheasant chick can fly a short distance at 12 days while it is around 70 days before a young golden eagle makes its first flight.
- Though adult house sparrows feed almost exclusively on seeds, their chicks require a high protein diet of insects. This is one reason they thrive where there are hedges.
- Once they've left the nest most garden birds continue to be looked after by their parents, sometimes for several weeks.
- In many species, including blackbirds and robins, only females incubate the eggs - but both parents knuckle down to find food for their young.
- Most chicks leave their nests soon after dawn or in the early hours of the morning.
- from hatching to fledging - which can be less than two weeks - a chick will increase its weight tenfold.
- Long-tailed tits make their nests with a high proportion of spiders’ webs. This makes the nest stretchy, so as the nestlings get bigger so does the pocket-like nest..
- Sparrowhawk chicks hatch in mid June, timed for when an abundance of fledglings provides parents with easy hunting.
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