I live outside Boston, MA. A friend of mine had a robin's nest on an overhang near her bedroom window recently, and they managed to position an outdoor camera on the nest and have it play on a TV. They saw something I thought was remarkable and I hadn't heard about before. When the fledglings seemed mature enough to leave the nest, the parent robin came back to the nest with some type of small snake. When the first chick began to eat the snake, the parent robin yanked the other end that was in her beak and flew away, thereby flinging the fledgling out of the nest and into the air. Then, she came back with a second snake, and tried it again with the second fledgling. But this time the snake slipped out of her beak, and she flew away but the fledgling remained in the nest, gobbling down the rest of the snake. I am having trouble getting the video inserted here, but wanted to post this anyway. Has anyone else seen this or heard about this happening? I can't imagine what else the parent was trying to do except to evict the fledglings from the nest. As the nest was on the roof, she couldn't really push them out.
she was probably hacking the baby out raptors do this by not giving their kids food and then leaving food outside the nest so its either fly or die of starvation. kinda cool!
I have seen videos of raptors doing something like this, usually using live/injured prey, to get fledglings to leave the nest. Peregrines may do it sort of accidentally, though, as the parents seem most interested in avoiding the sharp beaks and talons of their growing offspring.