Expert: Roger Lederer - 5/16/2007

Question
No doubt, you have been asked this question many times but I cannot ever remember encountering an answer to it.  While watching a seagull glide and swoop the other day, it occurred to me that I had never seen other than adult gulls.  This led me to reflect on the fact that I had never seen any chicks of any type of birds in the wild, save an occasional nest of sparrow babies blown to the ground by the wind.  Since it seems unlikely that parental birds would not tolerate the chick-to-old-bird presence of their offspring forever residing in the nest, just when do wild birds make themselves viewable to humans and other animals?

Answer
Well, I could give you a long complicated answer, but I'll make it short although it won't be complete. I'm sure you have seen immature gulls but did not recognize them as such (they have a different coloration for two years before they get the mature plumage). And I'm sure you have seen ducklings and goslings in the wild. As far as songbirds go, they leave the nest mostly feathered but unable to fly and aren't very visible on the ground or in the brush. However, when they do begin to fly a few days later, they are the same size as an adult and more or less (depending on the species) look like one. So when you think you see two female House Sparrows, you could actually be seeing one adult female and a three week old immature bird. Roger Lederer at Ornithology.com