Should I kill this bird?

[HolHello]

On holiday. Baby bird been flapping around for 3 days now. Been giving it water but feel like I'm prolonging it's suffering. Reception says it just happens this time of year and they can't do anything and there's no charities for these very common birds.

It just keeps flapping into ours and next doors balcony. It can't fly. There's no one to take it.

Reception say just leave it and nature will take it's course. But I feel awful leaving it in the sun to slowly die.

Surely it would be better to get DH to end it quickly? :(

It's got feathers but can't walk or fly and it's spent the last 3 days just falling around the bushes and balconies. People keeping putting it back in the bushes and it makes it's was out again onto the scorching tile.

Do you know what species it is? Some birds (eg, blackbirds in the UK) leave the nest before they can fly, their parents continue to look after them until they can take off and fend for themselves.

Ah, I think you may need to consider Bird Flu. I would get some disposable gloves and if you can remove it from the balcony.

I would leave it. I recently had a young blackbird in the garden for over a week, walking round, couldn't fly, parents still came and fed it then one day off it flew.
Could you post a picture so we could try and identify it?

I'd probably leave it or possibly try to move it to a underneath a nearby hedge so that it has cover.

Has it fallen out of its nest? Can you see a nearby nest with parent birds of the same species going in and out? If so, could you safely pop it back in while the parents are away from the nest?

If not, are the parents visiting the baby and feeding it? Could you put it in an open, shallow cardboard box (like the ones that bags of fruit are displayed in, in supermarkets) and put the box in the shade but near mum and dad, to keep it safe?

If it's very young and parents are definitely not attending to it, it might be kinder to dispatch it - though I'm not sure how you would do this. I have vague recollections of people wringing chickens' necks, but I don't know what this means in practice.

If it's well feathered and looks as if it just needs a few more days growth before it can look after itself, you could possibly try feeding it caterpillars or perhaps some mashed-up cat food on a soft paintbrush. Some baby birds will "gape" if you touch the corner of their mouth, others if they see something ( such as your hand, holding the paintbrush with food on) swooping towards them as a parent bird would...but you have to do it every hour or so from dawn til dusk.

It depends if you can see if parents visit, but you do have to watch carefully as they can be very quick and quiet.

If it looks as though its deteriorating over the 3 days, and you can stomach killing it, then do it.

I hate suffering but unfortunately I cannot actually do the killing myself. Thank goodness in the UK all vets have to treat wildlife in an emergency situation, even if its only euthanasia.

It’s probably a fledgling. It’s supposed to be on the ground. The parents will be somewhere (or might have been until people started picking up the poor thing and putting it in a tree) feeding it until it’s strong enough to fly. Leave it be.