OMG, Evelyn! If you knew how many baby mockingbirds I hand fed while working at Audubon, you'd die! People would bring in baby birds all day long, and you couldn't convince them to leave them alone, so my job was to take care of them and get them prepared to be released back into the wild later on. One of the reasons we do not encourage people "rescuing" the baby birds is that there comes a time when the bird has imprinted so strongly on the parent bird, it will not take food from a person. You can cram it down their throats, but it will just sit in the crop area and not be digested. So removing them from the parent's care is often a death sentence. Now if a whole nest comes down (like during a storm) sometimes there is no recourse but to rescue them and try to feed them. And I know techniques have improved GREATLY from the days I was involved in bird rescue. So the odds might be better now. But lordy, lordy...I must have handraised at least 200 baby mockingbirds in a couple years time. Not to mention jays, grackles, thrashers, titmice, and maybe 1,000 mourning doves! (My least favorite baby birds of all time.) Anyway, your picture is a trip down memory lane for sure. Saintp, the length of time it takes an egg to hatch varies from species to species, but usually it is not very long. A week or ten days, often. I'll see if I can find out about bluejays. I don't remember. Maybe I never even knew. But the info is probably out there somewhere. Will get back to you later. Marcia

Above from gardianangelss is spam. Don't click.

Awwww..so sorry to hear of this. That storm came through my yard too, and took one of my Bradford Pears down. It landed across my driveway, and luckily did not hit the house or our basketball goal. Gosh, it came through really fast. If you are not seeing them back at the house at all, then they have abandoned the nest. You don't need to wait the 2 weeks to remove the nest. Give it a few days, and when you are sure that they have abandoned, go ahead and remove the nest. Maybe they will build there again. There is still plenty of time.~~Angie

There are some birds that lay their eggs in another birds nest. The Cuckoo, Cowbird, Whyda, Honeyguide and Black-headed Duck come to mind. "These birds, called brood parasites, lay their eggs in another bird's nest and let the other bird parents feed and raise their chicks. The "egg abandoner" is then free to mate again and lay more eggs in another nest. The cuckoo is the best known brood parasite and an expert in the art of cruel deception. Its strategy involves stealth, surprise and speed. The mother removes one egg laid by the host mother, lays her own and flies off with the host egg in her bill. The whole process takes barely ten seconds. Cuckoos parasitize the nests of a large variety of bird species and carefully mimic the colour and pattern of their own eggs to match that of their hosts. Each female cuckoo specializes on one particular host species. How the cuckoo manages to lay eggs to imitate each host's eggs so accurately is one of nature's main mysteries."