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| Hand feeding Advantages | How to hand feed |
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Baby birds are adorable! Sure, they may be a little hard on the eyes when they are naked and bug-eyed, but it isn't long before those hard little pin feathers start blossoming into the colorful splashes of the rain forest and those bug eyes start to darken and ease into that look of, "If you feed me, I will love you," and later, "If you care for me and give me attention, I'll love you even more."
Hand feeding is the process used to raise baby birds called chicks. Hand feeding means we use a syringe (without a needle), spoon or tube to give a special food to the chick. It does not mean we use our hands to actually put food into the baby's mouth.
Most birds (including parrots, finches and canaries as well as all songbirds) are altricial. Altricial means the baby bird hatches from the egg blind and without any feathers. They are totally dependent on another to care for them.
Some birds (like ducks and chickens) are precocial. This means they hatch with their eyes open and a thick coat of down feathers to protect them. They can survive on their own if food is available.
When an altricial bird feeds her young, she regurgitates (brings back up) food
she has stored in her crop. The crop of birds is an outpocketing of the
esophagus, and is very visible in baby birds, extending from just below the jaw
to just above the top of the breast bone. The main crop function is storage of
food material for eventual movement into the stomach and intestines of the bird.
When the mother comes into the nest or cavity, the baby bird bobs its head and beak up and down inside the mother's beak and the food from the mother passes into the esophagus and crop of the baby. Baby birds close the entrance to their trachea, or wind pipe, when feeding so the regurgitated food won't choke them. With the hand feeding process, the syringe and the hand feeder replace the natural mother. You become the mother and father of that baby.