Expert: Roger Lederer - 4/9/2008

Question
Hi Roger, I am hoping you can help me. Last night I came in around 9 p.m. and was pretty much attacked by a robin on my front porch. It flew around frantically, knocking up against the porch and the porch roof, but it would not fly away. I nearly had a heart attack! Today my husband noticed a pair on the front porch in our fern hanging basket, so we assume there is a nest. Complicating matters, we are trying to sell our house and obviously a bird attack would not make for good curb appeal! But we also do not want the birds to be harmed, especially the babies. My question is, will the birds attack during the daytime when most likely buyers would come by our house? (we have not yet seen them during daylight hours - we come and go during the day and there are no problems.) Can we move the nest to the other side of the porch - about 15 feet away?(It's a half wrap-around porch so we would move to the back corner farthest away from the front door) Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated - we really do not want to unwittingly harm these birds.

Answer
Moving the nest a few feet might be ok, but any more than that and the parents might abandon it. If there are no eggs in the nest yet, it makes some sense to move it. Once eggs are there the parents are more sensitive and that seems to be the case. At night the birds get disoriented and are likely to behave as you described. During the day they would most likely just fly off and squawk. In any case they will not "attack" anyone and certainly not harm anyone. If you haven't noticed this behavior during the day, then there seems to be no problem unless you have potential buyers come at night.