Frequently Asked Questions about Robins: Nest and Egg Problems Q. Can I move a robin's nest? Please help! We recently discovered that a robin had built a nest in my daughter's 'fort' portion of her swingset. My husband looked a couple days ago and there was one egg in the nest. He removed the slide and the steps so that children will stay out of the 'fort' but the problem is we are moving in three weeks and the swingset will have to be dismantled and moved with us. What can we do? According to what I've learned by reading some of your information, the egg(s) will hatch by this time but it will still be too early for the baby birds to be out of the nest. Is there any way we can relocate this nest? Please help. I find myself worrying about this daily." A. Unfortunately, no. If you move a robin's nest the parents will most likely abandon the nest, eggs and/or young. Nest-site fidelity grows during the nesting season--the more time and energy the birds invest in it, the less likely they are to abandon it when disturbed. However, actually MOVING the nest is not merely a disturbance--it makes the entire nest environment DIFFERENT. Is this because birds know to abandon a nest that appears to have been discovered by a predator? This is a part of it, but actually moving the nest makes it appear like a different nest. As the mother builds, she is memorizing all the features around the nest. When those features are gone, she may simply not even recognize her nest anymore. (I took care of four baby Blue Jay nestlings, well feathered, after their nest and its branches were knocked out of a tree in a storm. The people who found it all recovered the nest and put it in another near-by tree, but even with the babies calling, they simply didn't figure it out, and they'd invested a LOT of time and energy into these babies already.) Thus, the birds' fidelity is to the whole setting. Interestingly, there is a documented case of a robin that raised babies on the structure of a crane that was operational during the time she built, incubated, and raised her babies in it. And another case of a robin that nested in a train car, and followed it when it moved from place to place. But I can't find an instance of a robin staying with her nest when the nest was put on another structure. So, I don't know what to tell you about moving your swingset. It would have been far better to take the nest apart as soon as you noticed her so she could simply build a new nest elsewhere and not lose well developed eggs or babies when the nest would be moved later, since they knew they would be moving, but it's too late for that now. Hopefully reading this may be helpful to others in the future. Q. Is this common for a robin to build two nests at once? We have a pair of robins nesting under our deck on the supporting beam. We have been watching the female fly off to collect nesting material. She has built 2 nests within 5 feet of each other. I thought at first she had started one and abandoned it, but she has worked on them both and they are almost finished, and in 2 days! Can you tell me any reason why she would do this? Could she be building her second nest already for summer? Let me know if you have any ideas. A. This is a question we hadn't seen before, so we wrote to Len Eiserer, the author of THE AMERICAN ROBIN: A BACKYARD INSTITUTION. He answers, "Building multiple nests simultaneously happens every now and again in robins. One started 26 different nests on roof rafters of a garage under construction; another built 8 on successive steps of a fire escape. Support from underneath is the primary site selection factor for the female robin -- it's more important than concealment, e.g. Since some human structures provide repetitive sites with terrific support, the female can get "seduced" into building multiple nests. This is an example of "supernormal stimuli" -- artificial stimuli that are even more effective than those provide by Mother Nature (tree limbs in this case). Animals have a hard time resisting supernormal stimuli. There are many other examples. Your robin will probably settle on one site and just lay eggs in that nest, or else just incubate eggs in that nest after laying, say, one egg in one nest and two in the other. She almost definitely will NOT lay two complete sets of eggs and try to incubate both of them. Q. Will a blue jay steal eggs from a robin's nest? We have been watching two nests in our yard. Yesterday I found an egg in another part of the yard. I checked one of the nests and all four eggs were gone. For some reason I'm thinking blue jays will rob a robin's nest. Is that what happened? A. The main predators of robin eggs are snakes, squirrels, blue jays, and crows. (Deer eat a lot of bird eggs and nestlings, too, but only from ground nests.) Snakes swallow eggs on the spot, and since you found one egg in another part of the yard, a snake most certainly wasn't the culprit. Squirrels usually stay up in branches, and seldom drop their eggs, so I'm betting it wasn't a squirrel, either. Jays and crows are both egg and nestling eaters, and so it's hard to be sure which species raided your nest. Robins actually appreciate having jays around as long as they stay away from their nests, because jays are good at warning about other dangers. But it's heartbreaking to lose the eggs or nestlings of any nest to predators. And the worst problem with crows and jays is that both species are highly intelligent. If you are studying the nests in your yard, be sure that there are no crows or jays watching you-if they figure out that you're watching nests, they may start watching for you to lead them to their next supper. Q. Help! We found a robin's egg in our yard. Is there anything we can or should do with it? Thanks. A. The best thing to do with an egg that you find is to simply leave it be. I know you're concerned about the little baby growing in it, but there is a big chance that there may not even be a baby in there. This may be an egg that wasn't fertilized, or didn't develop properly. After the other babies are a day or two old, the parents get rid of unhatched eggs just in case one of the growing babies accidentally crushes it. Rotten eggs are NO fun! There is also a chance that there really was a healthy baby inside the egg. One likely case: a predator may have carried off the egg, and dropped it in a panic as the angry parents dive-bombed it. Although the egg looks fine on the outside, the baby inside may have been badly shaken during the flight and especially when it was dropped. If so, the baby inside may already be dead or may soon die, and if it does survive to hatch, there is a strong possibility that it will be badly deformed, making its short life unendurably painful. Even if the egg were perfectly healthy, the chance of a human successfully incubating the egg and then successfully raising the baby from a hatchling is VERY remote. Robin eggs require high humidity, gentle daily turning, and level heat. You'd need a high-quality incubator to do it properly. Then once the babies hatch, parent robins feed them regurgitated worms and insects for the first three or four days--something humans just can't do!. Newly hatched robins are weak and helpless, and their parents are designed precisely and have the exact right instincts for taking care of them. Our human hands are clumsy, and we have too many other concerns in our daily lives to devote every waking moment to a baby robin, as its real parents would do naturally. People tend to both under- AND over-estimate the amount of food baby robins need, giving them too much in single feedings and not enough over an entire day. The real parents spend literally every waking hour searching for food for them, returning to the nest every few minutes all day long, from sunrise to sunset. Can you do this consistently for several weeks? It's also very difficult to make a baby bird diet exactly balanced. Robins feed their young worms, insects, spiders, and some fruits. Outdoors, the nest is shaded enough to protect from sun but gets a few rays of sun each day, which the baby requires for manufacturing Vitamin D-3. Indoors, you need to provide this vitamin, but it's very difficult to make the precise balance of calories and vitamins and minerals that natural robin parents provide. There are very good reasons why it is against state and federal laws in the US to raise wild baby birds. Death at the hands of well-meaning people who aren't feeding a robin nestling the proper diet can be painful for the baby. Far, far better to just allow the egg to cool. If a baby is still alive in there, it will simply stop developing within the egg, before it develops any awareness of pain. Q. Help! Should we try to raise abandoned eggs ourselves? A robin nest on our eaves had seven eggs in it, and suddenly the robins are GONE! We haven't seen the mother in four days, and we've been watching! What happened? A. Ornithologists call robins determinate layers. After a female robin lays four or five eggs, her body simply stops producing more until she's incubated and raised these. So seven eggs is too many for one robin to have laid. There must have been another bird laying her eggs in there besides the pair. That may be why it was abandoned. Robins only abandon their eggs when something happens that tells the robins they will have a poor chance of success. It seems unlikely that humans can have better success. I know how sad it is to see these beautiful eggs and how very tempting it is to want to save the tiny babies inside. But it's just as heartbreaking to watch the babies start out healthy, with their egg sac to provide some nutrition for a couple of days, and then wither and die at our hands. This Season Teachers Kids Orientation Registration Search Copyright 1997-2008 Journey North. All Rights Reserved. Questions or comments? Contact us.