I am letting you off the hook.
My first job. The lot I worked with made a game of Ruin Kila's Weekend. The building we worked in had a high roof. The birds would make their nests in the rafters as there were no large trees nearby.

Cue Friday afternoon, almost quitting time. One or another would bring a bundle of baby bird, telling me if had fallen from its nest. I would dutifully take the bird home and spend the weekend carefully feeding it. By Monday morning, without fail, the baby bird would be dead. I would arrive at work, shattered and sad, only to suffer the cruel questions from the rescuer of a now-dead baby bird. And taunts from his mates. Until I came to be known as Killa. Bird Killa.

I stopped taking baby birds home. Do not accept little bundles of baby bird. Avert the eyes. Do not look at the tiny shadow on the pavement as you walk to the carpark.

Years later, I learned, baby birds simply do not fall from nests. They are pushed. Pushed out by the larger chick, or pushed by parents who realize they will not survive. Often pushed by being beaten and pecked within an inch of its tiny life. Nature is cruel. Only the strongest can survive, and birds have to make tough choices.

I learned this because Mum later married a bird breeder, and we would watch the baby birds get shoved out by the parents or the older chicks, watch as the baby birds fought vainly to stay in the nest, watch as they did this again and again if we tried to replace the baby birds. I raised baby birds that we removed BEFORE they'd been beaten and pecked. They had grips of steel, none ever fell.

The parents will never abandon a healthy chick. The chick will scream and the parents will try to defend it, encourage it to fly (even ones with just a few real feathers can fly a bit), and they will feed it. A silent baby bird with no parents about is a baby bird about to be food.

You, off the hook, now. The baby bird would have died anyway.
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 11:05, 2 replies)

Nature is cruel and horrible, but not nearly as cruel and horrible as your colleagues sound! My God, that must have been soul destroying, Monday mornings are bad enough without feeling like you've killed something.
(Bob Frapples is de-lurking on, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 11:34, closed)

Lozzie sounds like a really nice Chick
I like sensitive chicks x
(TwinkleFuckingToes Has a ingrown toe nail, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 12:36, closed)

Haha!
I am really nice, or at least I reckon my dog thinks so!
(Bob Frapples is de-lurking on, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 17:54, closed)

Do you think the parents knew the weekend meant "no food from the humans"?
Yes... I dreaded facing them at work on Monday morning. It started out innocently enough. They really meant well. Then it got to be a common joke to "give it to Kila, she kills everything!" Creatures I did not kill (immediately): turtles, kittens, budgies, dozens of lost dogs, a rabbit and a mongoose. Partly to prove I did NOT kill everything. :)
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 20:38, closed)

I hope they didn't
...it'd make me feel worse thinking I had distressed them too, on top of the obvious distress they would have been in if he had fallen, that is.

Do you live in a zoo?!
(Bob Frapples is de-lurking on, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 21:01, closed)

I take in strays
At least that's what my best mate told the future Mr. Kila.

I meant that I was just wondering if the bird parents recognized the humans' go-away-for-the-weekend noises and kicked out the weaklings so as not to waste energy on them, knowing no easy food was forthcoming from the humans. Well, crumbs from biscuits and such... that we'd leave for the birds when we would eat lunch outside (we were messy eaters).

Rumor has it I was raised in a zoo. Not true, not true. Zoos have standards for raising the young.
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 22:21, closed)

We had a number of successful rearings
My dad was the go-to guy at his work for any injured/lost/unwanted wildlife. We had a number of successes, but these were outnumbered heavily by failures. Most birds will die overnight from shock. If you can get fluids in to them before then you have a chance.

My most memorable success was a housemartin chick that was very young with no feathers. We fed it all the way to a juvenile with full flight feathers. Then we knew we had to let it go. We had no idea if it could fly or not, as it spent its time in our porch, but when I lifted it above my head and motioned for it to fly away, it did nothing. Sat there, uninterested. Before anyone could say anything, I decided it needed some tough love and I threw it upwards. Suddenly it whirled upwards, circled the garden a couple of times in true hollywood clicheness and shot off, never to be seen again. I cried.
(mersault, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 12:51, closed)

Oddly enough
That's what you're meant to do with housemartins, swallows, etc. They can't take off from the ground because their legs are too short so you have to throw them upwards. Touching story though :)
(Petite chien is going to do science to it, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 13:39, closed)

Ours were doomed...doomed I say!
Good work on your housemartin!

My step da taught me to recognize the splayed legs indicating the chick was weak and could not support itself, probably due to being beaten nearly dead by some big bully sibling, or worse, its own parent.

These were all house sparrows, every last one died.

Some success with mynah birds, a lovely triumph but completely illegal in our area as they are protected as wild animals. We'd turn them over to the nearby "bird lady" who had a special dispensation from the Pope of Good Animal Care to take in wild animals. She once screamed at me to feed the mynah chick some dog food and put it back and stop touching it, the parents would get it to fly back up to the nest. She only stopped screaming at me when I told her I caught it in the pool, where it had tried to jump on my head as I was swimming. Bird brains...

I did have much success with budgies, cockatiels and parrots of all types. Raising 2 parrots and 11 baby cockatiels at once is my record.
( kila is reading clocks upside-down as usual, Wed 1 Sep 2010, 22:31, closed)