It doesn’t matter where you live in the world, the vast majority of our readers will be either in a location with a large number of local pigeons or close to a location with a large number of pigeons.
Due to pigeons essentially sharing our towns and cities with use these days, we often see questions from people based around how to care for injured or baby pigeons that they find as they go about their day.
It is great to see people being responsible and looking to care for any pigeons that need help but you always have to be sure that the pigeon does actually need help.
Although we do see a large number of people asking about when a baby pigeon can feed itself due to thinking that the baby pigeon has been abandoned or has fallen out of its nest, this can sometimes cause problems as the parents of the baby pigeon are close by but too scared to approach the nest due to you being near it.
Still, there are a large number of reasons why a baby pigeon may end up having problems and need a human to help feed it so we have decided to publish this article to try and help anyone who does find a baby pigeon.
Unfortunately, it the baby pigeon is less than two weeks old, its chances of survival is low no matter what you or anyone else does but if it is older than the two week point then you can often feed the baby pigeon a baby bird food to help nurse it until it can take care of itself.
Can Baby Pigeons Survive Without Their Mother?
The majority of baby pigeons are not able to take care of themselves and will require their parents or a helping hand from a kind human to survive if their parents abandoned it.
If the baby pigeon is very close to leaving the nest then its chances of survival without its mother are considerably higher but this usually only offers a two to three day window with younger baby pigeons often having poor odds of survival.
In very rare situations, the nest of a baby pigeon may have enough food available for it to survive a couple of days or even a week until starvation sets in with this potentially helping increase its chances of survival but this is very rare.
Depending on the exact situation, you can try to put a baby bird food on the nest with the baby pigeon in it to limit the amount of human interaction that it gets but this is often a waste of time in our opinion.
The majority of pigeons interact with humans in some way every day and quickly form a bond with the people walking about.
In our opinion, it is often better to try and bring the baby pigeon indoors to reduce the chances of a potential predator getting it, especially if the pigeon has fallen out of its nest.
This not only helps to protect the baby pigeon from predators but also allows you to keep it warm while also feeding it.
What Do Baby Pigeons Eat?
Wild baby pigeons often eat whatever their mother is able to find for them with this usually being seeds, insects, or whatever humans have fed them or left for them to feed on.
The mother will often crush the food up, swallow it so her own stomach acids start to break the food down and then fly it back to her nest to regurgitate it for the baby pigeons to eat.
This is very difficult for a human to replicate to keep the food safe for a baby pigeon and although an abandoned baby pigeon that you are caring for may end up pecking at bread or anything else you give to it, you really do need to try and get a baby bird food as soon as possible.
Thankfully, they are very cheap and easy to use as you literally just place the food near the baby pigeon for it to peck at.
As we mentioned earlier though, if your baby pigeon is less than two weeks old there is a high chance of it having problems and not being able to survive even if you do everything perfectly due to it being so delicate.
Try to keep in mind that some baby pigeons that have fallen from their nest may have also injured themselves in the fall due to not being able to fly meaning that they may have internal bleeding or damaged organs reducing their chances of survival.
When Can Baby Pigeons Feed Themselves?
A baby pigeon will be able to eat itself and thus start to feed itself by eating normal foods between the ages of two to four weeks.
Keep in mind that an abandoned baby pigeon may not have been fed for some time before you found it so its malnourished state will come into play with its development and can slow things down drastically, sometimes by weeks.
A simple test that you are able to do with any baby pigeons that you are caring for is to simply put a small piece of fresh bread near the pigeon each day to see if it eats it by itself.
The majority of baby pigeons will choose to eat the bread when they are ready to move on from baby bird food but if the pigeon just pecks at the bread a few times and then pays it no more attention, it is usually not ready.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over when a baby pigeon can feed itself to an end. We hope that we have been able to help our readers better understand how they are able to feed a baby pigeon that they are taking care of. A large number of the baby pigeons that people find can be nursed back to full health and then released back into the wild once they are ready. Some of these baby pigeons tend to stay local and pay their adoptive parents a visit every now and then too!
