Q. We just saw a baby robin hopping about on our back lawn. He cannot fly at all and his tail is only about a half-inch long. Our neighbor has three cats that she allows to roam the neighborhood, and we know for sure that the bird is going to be cat food right out in the open like that. What is the best thing to do in this situation?
Ellen Greenberg, West Hempstead
A. This time of the year my phone rings all day long with questions like yours, and the answer is always the same: Please put the baby back outdoors so its parents can care for it as they will do a better job than any human can.
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Baby songbirds leave the nest as soon as they have enough feathers to maintain their body heat, and can toddle about as you saw the little robin do. It takes another few days for them to actually fly, but as long as they are all in the nest together they draw a lot of attention to predators and if a cat finds a nest of babies then all the babies die. If they leave the nest as soon as they can and split up — one hiding here and the other hiding there — then the parents will feed each baby in turn in its hiding place and thus there is a better chance of at least one not being found by your neighbor’s cats.
If the baby is lucky and you are able to hide it well enough under a shrub, then it will grow rapidly and be flying in a few days and will be able to learn all the skills it needs to survive.
Q. Last fall we had a garden center install a lily pond in our yard. It is 9-foot wide, 3-foot deep in the bottom and 2-foot deep at the edges. We put in about 30 large goldfish and 27 of them survived the winter and are out of hibernation. We are feeding them again as we did last fall. However, these past few days the pond is like a war zone. The goldfish are all fighting with each other and chasing each other all over the pond to where the water actually gets frothy. So far, none has died or gotten hurt, but we do not know what to do here or why they are doing it.
Casey Adams, East Islip
A. There is no problem here at all. What you see is the normal mating behavior of goldfish. After they come out of hibernation and become active again, their hormones rise and they know it is time to spawn. The males develop little bumps on their gill covers and they then chase the females about and rub those bumps along the sides of the females, thus stimulating them to lay their eggs. The males fertilize the eggs as the females lay them. In your average garden pond, the filtration present will usually suck up most of the eggs laid and destroy them, but there are a few who survive in the pond and hatch into baby goldfish. The babies are almost microscopic at first, and when they grow bigger they are dark in color and hard to see. But whatever ones that do survive will usually be large enough and gold enough in color for you to notice by July or August, and if you have enough filtration in the pond then they will just join the rest of your school of fish as new additions to the fraternity.
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