PSA:My Mother never told me this! Reblog to save a baby Bird:)
JUST A LITTLE HISTORY FACT MY GRANDFATHER TOLD ME:
The reason this myth was a thing, was because back in the 30’s-50’s or so ( I can’t remember the time)
There was a parasite that was living in birds. It was hard to explain it to children, so they basically made up this myth so children wouldn’t touch the birds incase it carried the parasite.
THE MORE YOU KNOW YEA?
There’s no parasite, aside from your occasional typical wild-animal flea or mite infestation, and there never was. Parasites don’t mystically vanish from the earth, after all; as a rule, they tend to be pretty successful at species survival.
The origin of this myth is 99% likely to be an attempt to keep small children from picking up baby birds they find and carrying them off. To that end, it remains a tempting lie to tell an overly curious kid, even for adults who know it’s not the truth.
Birds do have a sense of smell; it’s about equivalent to a human’s (which is to say, they BARELY have a sense of smell). But even if they can smell your obnoxiously perfumed hand lotion all over their babies, it’s hardly going to make them abandon the little tykes.
(The same goes for deer, which have a much better sense of smell than a bird and will simply lick your repulsive predatory human-scent off if you’ve touched their fawns. Which is not permission to go groping the little speckled deerlets, no matter how much I’d you’d like to.)