Can a bird be too shocked or scared to fly?

He might be a young bird, fledgling, that is in transistion to big bird skills, or, maybe he was stunned, hit a window or something.

Birds can suffer concussions and neurological damage from flying into objects, usually windows. If he’s back up off the ground preening, looks like whatever happened was not too serious.

Many birds will fly into windows and stun themselves. They often recover with minimal intervention.

He might just have been learning to fly.

I have a pair of doves that nest on my front porch and they always have 2 babies.The timing between when they fledge is always different and some are less graceful than others.
That dove might have had a narrow escape and was trying to regain it’s composure…or it was hammered;)

I live in wine country and a few years ago our local wildlife rescue was getting a large number of hawks that seemed to have neurological damage. It was a mystery, was it a disease?

Someone finally put 2 + 2 together and realized that one of the local vineyards had dumped a huge pile of grape castings on their property in the area that these birds were being found.

Turns out the hawks were eating drunken blackbirds which were eating the fermenting grape castings and…a bunch of drunks hawks were falling from the sky. lolol

Sounds like the bird needed a breather.

@Coloma That’s hilarious!
It wasn’t a fledgling. He was full grown. They tend to run around in the yard a lot, which is dumb because there are a lot of cats. I guess yeah, he was stunned. I’m glad he turned out OK. I know there wouldn’t have been a thing that I could do, but I would have tried anyway.
@ChazMaz Yeah.

Could have just got some…I have seen birds mating and they take off like drunken sailors after. The preening is a dead give away! lol!

@Cruiser LOL! Could be right! Men! They’re all the same!

Sometimes when they lose their mate, they grieve terribly. Mourning doves can be extremely vocal. And, I recently learned, very violent toward other birds. That surprised me because I’ve always thought that doves represent peace.

They DO represent peace to us, probably because of their soothing cooing, but all birds are very territorial. It’s possible he/she lost his/her mate because damn if the cat didn’t bring in a dead dove to show us last night. :(

Yes, birds do mourn for a lost mate, but, it’s a bit of a myth the mating for life thing…it is true for many species like certain geese and waterfowl, but…while they do mate for ‘life’, that means what it implies.

If one is killed they will take another mate for ‘life’ eventually.

My chinese gander is 12 and is with his second wife for ‘life.’ lol

@Coloma What is a Chinese gander and what do you do with him?

@Val123

I have a pair of white chinese geese as pets, infact…they just got a huge new swimming pool today. lol

Yes, particularly a wild bird that has inadvertantly fallen into human hands, say, rescued from a cat. And even the ones that do fly away are still so shocked that they often die of shock later anyway.

@Coloma Where do you keep them?? Do you have a pen or…what? I would like to see a picture.

@Val123

Here they are in my avatar, Marwyn & Sonora.

I have a big horse corral I wrapped with weldwire to make a secure pen for them.
Custom goose barn, 2 big pools, stall mats, a big shady oak and two smoke trees. organic greens, best kept geese in america no doubt. ;-)

bam!!! Cool! Thanks for the pics!

OK OK OK!! What is the difference between your geese and mine in my avatar???

@Val123

Your goose is a white Embden…the down and pate geese of the planet. ;-(

A heavyweight European breed.

I had a white Embden for 11 yrs. she was a real sweetheart.

The Chinese geese originated in southeast Asia, they are a lighter weight breed, also known as the Swan goose. Used for weeding, not meat. They are talkative, smart and long lived ( 20+ years ) and have a ‘knob’ on their heads at the top of their beaks. So do the African geese.

@Coloma They have what I finally learned were African Swan Geese out at our local park, which is where I got the pic in my avatar. I’d never seen anything like it, and the knob on his beak really caught my attention. That and at one point he kind of stood up in the water and waved his wings, which made him LOOK like a swan. Did some research, and that’s what I found out.

It was probably just stunned by a recent collision with something. It’s like us, when we get winded, we need a minute or two to get our breath back again.

Yes they can be too shocked to fly. I have picked them up when they are beating themselves senseless trying to get out of the barn and they are so frightened they don’t fly away off of my hand when I hold it open to let them go. I just put them somewhere safe and quiet so they can get their wits about them and they eventually fly off.