isnt the mitzvah sending away the mother bird? is taking the eggs part of the mitzvah? in this case, where you dont want the eggs but want themitzvah, cant you just send away the mother birtd and just leave the eggs for the mother bird to come back to later on?

Dear Rabbi Kornfeld:

Naftali Weinberger, (author of "Shale'ach Teshalach" on the Mitzvah of Shilu'ach ha'Ken) wrote on your Discussion List: "...Please note that it is an established ornithological fact that the mother will return to the nest and continue incubating even if human hands have touched its offspring..."

I don't mean to disagree, but I am not so sure about that fact.

Please allow me to explain:

I had the pleasure of learning in Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in Sanhedria Murchevet in Yerushalayim, in 1984 through 1986. In the summer of 1985,

we had a nest of eggs on one of the lights of the Sukkah in the courtyard. Everyone tried to do this Mitzvah of Shiluach Hakan. So

many people (Bachurim and Kollel guys) tried to climb up to the top of the light by a ladder, and send away the mother bird, but the mother

bird, or the father bird (Nobody can ever really be sure if it was the mother bird or the father bird that was sitting on those eggs - even the Rambam states that that is one of the impossibilities of doing this Mitzvah correctly,) flew away before anybody was able to actually get up to the nest. Some of the guys rationaled that since the bird flew away because you were coming, you got the mitzvah. (Although The Rambam

seems to hold that you have to actually send the bird away, by lifting it off the eggs in the nest and sending it away in flight - another near impossibility - but I digress.) And so it was, every morning one person would start to climb up, the bird would fly away, and then this person would do a kinyan on the eggs. I left the Yeshiva that week to go to camp in the states. (I was actually feeding the birds every day while I was there - and I came very attached to my "Mitzvah Available Pets.") When I came back to Israel for my second Zman, Rabbi Kramer (my Rebbe) had a gift for me. He gave me the 2 eggs. As it turns out, the mother bird pecked a hole in each egg, what was inside, figuring that

this was a bad place to hatch them since every day somebody else was touching or trying to touch the eggs. Eventually the parent birds got

fed up with the locals and moved to another neighborhood to start their family, for there were no more birds or birds nest in the light of the Sukkah in the Yeshiva courtyard.

I then had those 2 tiny eggs preserved, and I show it off to interested people when I tell over that story along with my pictures of Bochurim

climbing the ladder for this very special mitzvah. (Or when I show pictures of my Mitzvah Birds - whom jokingly I named, "Lunch" and

"Supper.") My point being, I was told by a Bird Specialist at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, that the "Bird parents" know when human hands

touch the eggs, and then, they deem it as an unsafe home environment for their young birds to hatch and grow, so they poke holes in the eggs

killing their would be children. Better off than living in a place where you are bothered by the locals all the time! Anyway, I still have

these eggs with the holes in them as proof to my story.

I just thought that I would add this tidbit to the conversation on the Daf Discssion List.

So like I said, I am not sure if what Naftali Weinberger said that, "...Please note that it is an established ornithological fact (as well

as an easily observed one) that the mother will return to the nest and continue incubating even if human hands have touched its offspring..."

Like I said above, I am not really sure that he is 100% correct.

Keep it up!

Yaakov Radin :-)

A very interesting story! I find it very ironic that you write about Shilu'ach ha'Kan in Sanhedria hamurchevet. I lived there for four years when studying in the Mir and observed numerous "Shiluach ha'Kans" in that area.

I humbly disagree with your premise. I have seen many, many times that after the mother is sent she will continuously return to the nest. You yourself observed that the mother continues to return numerous times. While it is true that after approximately 8-10 times of being chased away she will not return, most definitely she does in fact return a number of times.

Only on rare occasions it happens that a mother bird does not return after being sent away the first time.

I spent many hours at the Jerusalem Bird Observatory (near the Knesset) and ornithologists there corroborated what I frequently observed with the dove and pigeon. They told me that birds have the worst sense of smell of all animals and cannot tell (through smell) if anyone has tampered with their nest (of course, they certainly can *see* a human tampering with the eggs). This is found in many books on ornithology, but due to my limited time I will not be able to locate the exact page numbers for you. (We have included below a random sampling of websites that express this fact. -YS)

Hatzlacha,

N. Weinberger

(author of "Shale'ach Teshalach" on the Mitzvah of Shilu'ach ha'Ken)