I have a house sparrow that lives on my covered porch. For the past few years, she has nested inside a hole in the eaves, and every few months, nestlings would fall to the porch and need to be rescued (if they survived). The hole the nest was in was tiny and awkward, and there was often to no way to put a nestling back into the nest if it fell out.
This year, my husband and I closed the hole off that she was using, as 10 baby birds later, we were kinda sick of the "surprises" waiting on our literal doormat when we would open the door to take the dogs for a walk. We closed it off with poultry netting last weekend, and were going to put up a birdhouse nearby it for her this weekend (today).
We went to go put it up this morning, and found ourselves with a conundrum. In the past two days, she has built a nest and laid an egg...in one of my windchimes.
I don't have an issue with this, and would normally leave it be, except that we live in a very very windy area, and while the past week has been calm, we're due for storms in the coming week.
We'd like to put up the birdhouse and move her nest (and the egg inside. They'd be less than 10 ft away from the wind chimes, a similar height....but more importantly, in a more secure and safer spot for the nest and a place we could return any fallen nestlings to.
I know you're never supposed to move a nest with eggs, but this feels like an emergent situation. Help?
Edit: I'm not 100% certain they are house sparrows - that's just what we were told she was by neighbors. She is notoriously difficult to get a picture to ID her with, and the nestlings are often only a couple days old when we get them, so we haven't been able to ID them that way.