I.. well my cat, found two little fledglings in the garden next to their nest.

I rang the RSPCA for advice and we've put them up in the tree they were under in a shoebox with their nest in it.

I've no idea how long they were there and just wondered if anybody else had successfully saved chicks and if the parents came back to feed them? Should I pop some food in the box with them? or is that over interfering?

I know natures pretty brutal, but it still gets me and I just want some nice stories really. By the way, luckily my cat isn't the best hunter when it comes to birds, even ones that can't fly apparently

We spotted a fledgling blue tit in our coal hole, a couple of years back - and we knew it had come from the nest box on the side of the house. It was rubbish at flying and had got down there but couldn't get back up - and that place is awash with cats, so it couldn't stay there a minute.

We put it back in the nest box and watched and sure enough mum came back and looked after it another day or two til it flew. As I say it was fledged though, and close to flying the nest.

Apparently birds have rubbish sense of smell and won't 'smell' you on the baby if you've had to handle it. Some go back after seeing a human handle the baby, (probably watching you from a safe distance) but some don't.

At the moment we're raising an abandoned mallard duck - he's beginning to fledge his grown up wings now and will be ready to set free in a few weeks. He's been hard work but it will be great if we can raise him to the point he can go free and at least have a chance of surviving.

Some vets will take baby birds if there are no bird parents about.

My old vets regularly updated me with the number of birds they were hand rearing due to them being abandoned.

Mind you, they might just be dumped momentarily. It is sad to read how many birds do not manage to rear their young successfully. That is why they have to have several clutches a year in some cases and in the case of cuckoos, their favourite egg/ baby sitters are getting rarer and thus fewer cuckoos.

Keep an eye on them because once you touch a chick the parents will usually abandon it with the smell of something unfamiliar on their feathers. We had an aviary for years as i grew up and was drilled into me how important it was never to touch the chicks we had.

I took baby birds to a vet a couple of times but they are very reluctant to take them or even examine them. They ask you to return the bird to where you found it so the parents can reclaim it.

I once put a baby blackbird in a sheltered box on an upper windowsill near the tree where its parents nested, and watched the parents come and feed it for a few days until it fledged. Cute.

(I closed the curtains so the cats couldn't gawp at it)

As Hogzilla said above, this isn't true - most birds have next to no sense of smell. It's still obviously a good idea to discourage kids from handling delicate baby birds, which I guess is why this idea is still so widely believed.

Bit like the popular advice 'Don't eat those red mushrooms with white spots, they're deadly poisonous' rather than the more truthful 'Don't eat those red mushrooms with white spots, they won't kill you but they're wildly hallucinogenic'.

OP, you're doing the right thing, and with luck the parents will keep feeding them. No need to put any food in the box with them (the food they need will be mostly small invertebrates anyway).