It's fledgling time of the year, when young birds, too young to fly properly but too silly to listen to their parents and stay put, throw themselves out of trees and end up hopping about on the ground cheeping indignantly.
The experts say to leave them right where they are.The parents are around and will feed their rowdy offspring, but they are likely to reject them if we put out sweaty human paws all over them.
I'm no expert but I say leave them where they are too. Really. Just walk away. No good will come of carting home a screeching fledgling.
Case in point: There we were, my daughter and I, waiting at the local coffee shop for our orders and the owner of the establishment said "there's a baby mynah bird on the concrete outside. It fell from the roof. I don't know what to do with it."
So we scooped up the ugly bird and took it to the nearest sucker ... I mean, took it to my mother who has an uncanny knack of raising these things and actually having them live.
Me - I put them in the hot water cupboard and feed them from an eye dropper and they are stone dead by morning, leaving me with nothing but a faint feeling of guilt and an empty box containing a dead bird to bury.
My mother took charge of the gross beastie and fed it and kept it warm and now it's several years old, rather beautiful (or so it tells me), talks, laughs, and rings like the phone.
Hence my mother takes ages to answer her phone because first she has to make sure it isn't the bird ringing.
Serves her right though, over the years she has scooped up feathery beasts from hawks to ducks, chickens and magpies.
Baby birds need feeding every 2 to 3 hours.
The first hawk was a ball of fuzz brought home by my brothers. It had the sharpest talons I have ever been attacked by and an industrial strength beak.
As it went from fuzzball to feathered fiend it began to attack everything red, including the lounge suite, Lego pieces and my nail polished toes. It was not a friendly animal.
And it could shoot poo like a firehose. And if that stuff dried on, you'd need to chisel it off. I swear we still have furniture bearing small concretions of long-dead-hawk poo.
The tiny feral chicken she rescued from the garden of a historical house and stuffed in my pocket for smuggling purposes was a tad friendlier.
He thrived on the hot water cupboard treatment and grew large and handsome, though with a rather unfortunate obsession with gumboots.
I guess there has to be some fallout from being raised in a cardboard box with a hot water bottle as a companion.
But it's not just baby birds you need to leave be. Baby possums should be left alone too.
Run, don't walk, when you are faced with an orphan possum.
Oh yes, they are cute. But they are also cunning. And nocturnal.
Before long that clingy baby you foolishly reared will be swinging from your curtains at 3am.
Still worse, if you happen to be living in a partially renovated older house with scrim on the walls - just if you are - possums love to race up and down that stuff for hours. In the middle of the night. Just saying.
Not cute. See, claws.
I have to admit to a guilty feeling of relief one morning when the possum was absent at breakfast time ... and the dog was sitting replete and guilty-looking amid a pile of grey fur.
There's generally a reason that wild animals are, you know, in the wild. Because if they were nice to have around we'd have domesticated them and re-named them "pets".
So when I saw on Facebook last week that someone had found an orphaned hedgehog and was looking for someone to take it I just laughed quietly to myself and scrolled on by.
Then someone tagged me in the post.
"Rachel will take it," they said.
"Ooh no she won't, not again," I thought.
Then someone else tagged me. And another, and another.
It's a wild animal, covered in spikes, and will not be cuddly or friendly or remotely grateful, I told myself. Let someone else put their foolish hand up.
Okay, so enjoy your weekend folks, I'll be the sucker over here in the corner, feeding an orphaned baby hedgehog with pet milk and an eye dropper.
