#PopularScience.Com

[xtruss]

What To Do If You Find A Baby Bird Out of Its Nest

It's a Myth That Parents Will Reject a Lost Chick Because of a Human Scent.

— By RJ Mackenzie | May 17, 2025 | Popular Science

First Determine If The Baby Bird Is a Nestling Or Fledging. Image: Jennifer M. Ramos, Getty Image.

The arrival of spring brings many changes to our natural surroundings. Flowers bloom, barren trees fill with leaves, and occasionally, baby birds come tumbling out of those trees. If you’ve ever encountered one of these not-quite-flighted chicks and wondered how best to look after them, you’ve come to the right place.

Your first aim upon finding a chick out of its nest is to work out whether it has accidentally fallen or is simply taking its first steps out of the nest. Siân Denney, who has had six years of wildlife experience for the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds, says you should determine if the bird is a nestling or fledgling. “Nestlings are the tiny, tiny babies with no feathers, and they’re at very early stages and very vulnerable,” says Denney. In contrast, fledglings have feathers but may lack the flight feathers needed to take to the skies.

Helping A Nestling

If the bird you’ve found is a featherless nestling, it will be at risk if left out of the nest. “The amount of care that birds require is intense. It is unlikely that a very young bird that age that’s got no feathers will survive if it is out of the nest,” says George Bradley, who works for wildlife charity SongBird Survival.

If you know which nest the bird has fallen from you should place it back in. Denney and Bradley advise that gloves should be worn for handling birds as a hygiene measure. Some people believe that if a well-meaning human handles a bird, its parents will cease to recognize its scent and reject it. This is a myth, says Denney. “Birds actually have a terrible sense of smell,” she says.

Garden bird species will usually make their nests in hedges or trees. However, other species, like gulls or sparrows, make their homes on rooftops or the underside of eaves. By watching to see if its parents appear to try to help it, you may be able to work out where its nest is hidden and whether it is accessible. If you can’t identify which nest a nestling has fallen from, it will still need to be moved off the ground, where it will be helpless against predators. The best option is to elevate the nestling. Placing them in a bucket or empty flower pot can protect them while still making it easy for their parents to find them.

Fledging Is a Part of Bird Life. Image: Getty Images Joni Eskridge

Helping A Fledgling

Denney has different advice if the bird you come across is a feathered fledgling. “They should just be left alone,” she says. “They’ve attempted to leave the nest because they’re ready to take to life outside and beyond,” she adds. Their parents will likely be surreptitiously monitoring them to check they have learned how to fly independently. Denney adds that fledglings can spend days or weeks on their ground as they learn to fly. If the bird is in obvious and immediate danger—your local cat is eyeing it up, for example—it can also be shooed somewhere more secure, like a bush or tree.

How To Help An Injured Bird

If a fallen bird is injured, it might be time to contact a local wildlife rehabilitator. These are experts who volunteer to care for sick or injured birds. These resources will vary by state. Humane World for Animals has a detailed list of rescuers and rehabilitators.

The overarching message is that baby birds eventually need to fly from their nest, and unless they are too young or in danger, leaving them alone to learn how to navigate the big, new world they find themselves in is the best course of action.

Humans can also proactively help by avoiding activities that put baby birds at risk of falling in the first place. Denney says that cutting trees or hedges aggressively or without checking for any nesting birds during the summer months can lead to disturbed or destroyed nests. Before you cut, says Denney, “check the area first for a couple of days. If you see signs of activity, it’s best just to postpone that cutting to let those birds nest in peace.”

Image: Courtesy of Songbird Survival

[lesliepump]

Should Law Blogs Allow Comments?

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Comment Problems

Trolls

You might not be able to win an argument on the internet, but does that mean we shouldn’t even have the discussion? Back when Popular Science online content director Suzanne LaBarre (@suzannelabarre) announced that PopularScience.com would no longer accept comments on new articles, the free trade of ideas took a hit.

LaBarre provided the following reasoning for hitting the “off” switch:

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

Her argument that comments that call into question scientifically-validated topics are influencing people’s perceptions for the worse, doesn’t seem to me to outweigh the value of the exchange of ideas. Because people make stuff up and lie, and some people buy it, there should be no conversation at all? I feel like I’ve heard this before.

It seems to me that there’s another option: comment moderation.

While supporting PopSci‘s move, The Washington Post‘s Alexandra Petri wrote:

The few places where the comments sections are the home of a vibrant, riveting, polite discussion are the ones where the host site has made a vigorous effort to create community.

Exactly. Unfortunately, Petri also concluded that major news sites just aren’t the place to have good discussions:

And even if you are a regular on news stories (hi, folks!), the nature of big news or breaking science is that if it’s big and controversial enough for people to flood in to read about it, that small regular community gets overrun. It is hard to maintain community in the middle of a stampede. You only use the correct forks when you aren’t fighting through throngs of people to tear hunks off the new carcass.

For what it’s worth, at the time of writing, both The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as, several other major online newspapers, have some form of commenting turned on.

There’s little question that discussion moderation requires vigorous effort. Even tiny sites may have to deal with hundreds, if not, thousands of comments on a regular basis. And the overwhelming majority of those are likely to be bots, trolls or spam. But is the solution to end the discussion altogether?

Of course, there is also room for publications that don’t allow comments. And maybe a scientific research site isn’t a great candidate for debate in a public forum. And of course, PopSci is free to define its identity. However, their message, as Marie-Claire Shanahan, Research Chair in Science Education and Public Engagement at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada puts it:

Well we didn’t really mean for people to be engaged, we just want you to listen to us more.

I tend to agree with GigaOm‘s Mathew Ingram who wrote in response:

both wrong and sad MT @jaredbkeller: Popular Science is doing away with comments: "Comments can be bad for science." http://t.co/fsPaD5kAqp

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 24, 2013

I also still agree with Slate‘s Will Oremus in that moderated comments have value:

Writing on Slate, I’ve encountered plenty of both varieties over the years, and on balance I far prefer a mix of useful and useless comments to no comments at all. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve been alerted to new developments, factual oversights, dissenting opinions, and fresh story ideas by readers using the comments section below my stories and blog posts. Commenters also help authors understand where they’ve explained a point in a misleading way, and what readers are taking away from their posts. Our commenting system is far from perfect, and yet I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Gizmodo’s Matt Novak neatly encapsulated the alternative: Writing on a site without comments, he said, felt like “whispering to myself in the wilderness.”

I wish Popular Science had taken a page from YouTube and come up with ways to make their comment system better.

Likewise, I don’t believe trolls, ignorance, and bots are sufficient justification to end the conversation on legal websites and blogs.

If your concerns stem from the resources required for moderation, there are a variety of ways you may limit those costs. For example, tools like Disqus can be configured to drastically reduce bots. You can also require users to register before commenting or use whitelists.

If you’re looking for examples of busy legal bloggers who are pulling it off, I direct you to Popehat and its comment policy.

Ghost Town

Another argument I regularly hear levied against comments goes something like this:

Blogs that have open commenting, but receive no comments, look sad.

To this I reply, “Boo-hoo.”

What’s more sad is that you decided to remove the ability for your audience to leave comments because of feelz or marketing. Instead, why not try to publish something that spurs discussion? Pro tip: this is actually much more effective for marketing.

The Case for Comments

Back at The Post, Petri observed that:

The more obscure and bizarre the niche group, the friendlier the comments. By and large the comments on your Erotic Lincoln Vampire Fanfiction are much kinder and better spelled than the comments on a major news story about, say, wiretapping and surveillance, which mainly consist of erratically capitalized screeds against the president and observations that would not be out of place in a toilet stall.

Which raises the question, do law blogs in general have the kind of niche audience that makes comments better than usual?

While generally not as inflammatory as the stuff found at PopSci, the legal blogosphere is hardly immune from, “shrill, boorish, specimens of the lower internet phyla.”

Furthermore, as some veteran curmudgeons are quick to point out, some of the comments may actually be eroding well-established principles of the practice of law. Should the legal blogosphere also “hit the off switch” on comments too?

Unfortunately, it seems the trolls are winning. Above the Law said farewell to comments in 2016:

Today the comments are not what they once were. Although occasionally insightful or funny, ATL comments nowadays are generally fewer in number, not very substantive (often just inside jokes among the commentariat), yet still often offensive. They also represent a very small percentage of our total traffic (as we can tell because of the click required to access them).

To me, it seems they had it closer to right back in 2009:

Here at ATL, we reserve the right to moderate comments as we see fit. We delete comments for reasons including (but not limited to) offensiveness, abusiveness, excessive profanity, irrelevance, or rank stupidity. Above the Law is a privately owned website; we have no obligation to provide our bandwidth to any particular user. Because we are not governmental actors, we are not subject to the equal-access rules of the First Amendment; when we moderate comments, it is not “censorship.”

But we also offer this recommendation to people who are offended by the comments: DON’T READ THEM. Toward that end, we want to make it easier for you to avoid the comments if you want to. Over the next 24 hours, we’ll be changing our site design so that comments will default to “hidden.” If you want to see the comments, you must affirmatively opt-in, by clicking a button to reveal them (either the “show them anyway” button within the post, or the “comments” button / counter on the front page).

At the risk of pummeling horse carcass, legal bloggers can use their judgment in deciding which comments see daylight. But I would suggest, that even those comments that go against everything veteran lawyers have learned from eons of practice have some value.

First, when attached to real identities, they help readers weigh the credibility of the person leaving the comment, as well as, the response. Second, they tease out “the work” of demonstrating why the comment is wrong.

To me, comments (even the dumb ones) are fundamental to the very nature of blogging. As noted at Wikipedia:

A majority are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers. There are high-readership blogs which do not allow comments, such as Daring Fireball.

Sure, there are plenty of great one-way blogs. But there’s something special about a blog that can result in a robust community in the comments.

Social Media as Comment Substitute

It has also been suggested by some that social media platforms are effectively replacing comments. This was part of the reason driving MarketingLand‘s and SearchEngineLand‘s decision to remove comments:

2.) We see much more commentary about our articles on social media.

We get a report every month showing all of the social activity surrounding both websites, and it’s not uncommon for each article and column we publish to get hundreds of engagements across social channels; our more popular articles often go over a thousand engagements. In most cases, this may just be a tweet or Facebook share of the headline and link, but very often there are comments and questions included in those social posts — certainly far more often than the few times our articles ever received on-page comments.

When I write an article for one of our sites, I regularly get engaged in conversation with readers on Twitter. And I see many of our staff writers and contributors doing the same. That’s anecdotal, but the overall evidence is unmistakable: Social media is where the commentary is taking place.

Here’s the problem:

Since your site decided to remove comments: I am left to discuss them on social media; Not much discussion this way either. ;(

— Bill Slawski ? (@bill_slawski) October 30, 2017

  When people arrive at a post or page, their attention is on the subject matter. Relying solely on social media for these conversations creates unnecessary barriers to the conversation. Most won’t bother to click through to Facebook pages to spark conversations. And those that do, face fractured conversations and platform limitations.

Social media is simply not a replacement for comments.

Comments and Legal Ethics

Of course, in considering whether to allow comments, lawyers must consider potential legal ethics issues. Especially those issues that relate to risks to clients and potential clients. Much of this risk can be diminished by holding comments for moderation before publishing. In other words, protecting clients and people with legal issues from posting something stupid that might put them in jeopardy. At a minimum, you should not allow any comments that reveal details about the commenter’s particular legal problem.

It’s also useful to provide visitors some information about your policy on comments. You might refer to The New York Times for some guidance. Or use something like this:

When you post a comment, you grant us the right to modify or delete your comment, but we have no duty to do so. If you want us to post your comment, make it coherent, relevant, and respectful.

Also, posting information about your legal problem on a public website is a bad idea. Any such comments will be deleted.

Mind Your Comment Settings

No matter which platform you choose, you should hold comments for moderation. If you’re a WordPress user (and you probably should be), get familiar with the comment settings in the Discussion panel:

I recommend checking the boxes for:

Comment author must fill out name and e-mail

Enable threaded (nested) comments at least 3 levels deep

An administrator must always approve the comment

For repeat comment policy violators, you can use the Comment Blacklist:

When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”. This text box acts the same as “When a comment conatins any of these words…” except comments which match these words will be deleted without warning. You may want to use this as a last resort, as genuine comments can end up deleted (WordPress 1.5 and later)

You might also consider requiring comment registration. However, Kevin O’Keefe provides a bunch of reasons why that’s lame. It really depends on the nature and purpose of your blog. But I agree with Kevin in that it’s likely to discourage people from commenting.

If you’re not satisfied with the WordPress comment system, there plenty of comment tools that can assist with moderation, like Disqus, Livefyre, and Facebook comments.

In addition to providing more advanced commenting options, third-party comment platforms can attract new readers. For example, if you embed Facebook comments, your commenters’ Facebook friends can see those comments, which may make them more likely to discover your blog. Remember, if you do use a third-party comment platform, configure them for moderation before posting.

What About Anonymous Comments?

One of the most effective ways to police unruly comments is to ban anonymous comments. As Jimmy Soni Managing Editor, the Huffington Post puts it defending HuffPo’s decision to end comment anonymity (citing Harper Lee):

We are capable of doing far worse things to one another when we do not have to own up to the things we do. The mob grants its members the gift of anonymity, but after Scout outs Mr. Cunningham, there ceases to be a “mob” in any real sense; there is just Mr. Cunningham, and associates. And when some kind of identity is attached to their group, the plans of that group carry a good deal more weight.

Of course, there are very compelling reasons against a total ban on anonymous comments.

It seems to me that we might want to nudge people to attach their identities to their comments, but at the same time, provide an avenue for anonymous comments. Again, this will largely be a judgment call for comment moderators.

My advice is to ask commenters to reveal their true identities, be liberal in deleting anonymous comments and allow readers to weigh the relative value of anonymous comments that meet “light of day muster.”

Should I Respond to Comments?

Responding to comments presents an additional layer of legal ethics issues. For example, can a lawyer respond to comments on their blog without creating an attorney client relationship? Sure they can. But they can also easily mistakenly cause someone to believe that the lawyer’s response was legal advice, thereby leading them to believe that such relationship exists.

So, should you respond? Sure, but don’t be stupid. Also, not every comment that’s worth publishing is worth responding to. Also, use disclaimers. Look, disclaimers are not magic Kevlar that will insulate you against every issue that arises. But they’re a good CYA practice.

If you largely ignore comments, you shouldn’t be surprised when people stop commenting, and perhaps, stop reading.

Law bloggers should also become familiar with how Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code (47 USC § 230) might apply to them, and more specifically, to comments on their blogs:

Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider. This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it. However, if you selected the third-party information yourself, no court has ruled whether this information would be considered “provided” to you. One court has limited Section 230 immunity to situations in which the originator “furnished it to the provider or user under circumstances in which a reasonable person…would conclude that the information was provided for publication on the Internet….”

Obviously, while Section 230 might provide protection from civil actions, lawyers are held to a different standard and really need to focus on the interplay of blogging, comments and their state’s rules of professional conduct.

Should Lawyers Turn on Comments in the First Place?

It might seem that comments are more trouble than they’re worth. If you’re feeling that way, you might re-examine why you’re even blogging in the first place.

To me, there are plenty of reasons to allow moderated comments. Comments extend the conversation beyond the substance of the post. They provide valuable feedback to the author. They can inspire future posts. They’re the symbiotic connective tissue between author and reader.

How Does it Make Me Look?

Some of you might still be worrying that allowing comments, but not having any, makes it look like nobody is reading your site. Well is anyone reading your site? If you mean to encourage comments and they are not coming, you should consider whether what you’re writing is “comment-worthy.” The lack of comments can be an indication that what you are publishing is not very interesting.

Do Comments Help My Pages Appear in Search Results?

Maybe. If your blog regularly motivates authentic comments, and you have properly implemented your commenting system to make it easy for search engines to index comments, then there’s little doubt that comments provide valuable feedback that search engines use.

However, if you don’t moderate your comments, leaving your posts riddled with spam comments, you might actually be hurting your posts’ chances of appearing in results. Furthermore, depending on your comment system configuration, you may be limiting your comments’ indexation. While Google has been indexing some sites’ Facebook Comments, it’s not clear that this has been completely resolved. Over at Blind Five Year Old, AJ Kohn breaks down some of the search issues presented by Facebook Comments. If you do use Facebook Comments, you should still extract them and display them inline for search engines.

As search engines continue to evolve, who comments on your site is likely to play a larger role in how your pages appear in search results. Yes, fix the technical issues preventing your comments from getting indexed. But more importantly, focus on publishing stuff that real people actually want to read and comment on.

Hopefully, it’s pretty clear how I feel about comments. What do you think?

This was originally published in 2013. It was updated and revised on 2018-02-13.

Should Law Blogs Allow Comments? was originally published on Lawyerist.com.

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