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What?

No it is not. Birds use their olfactory receptors to smell out bacteria to ascertain mates and wheter a chick belongs to a nest.

I've have seen it with my own eyes when some dumb hippy picked up a chick that fell out of a nest, that the other birds just neglected, it was weak and would otherwise die in anycase. The minute he touched it and walked away every bird in the area, its own nest, crows, everything flocked to it and literally pecked its brains out of its skull because it had human stank on it.

There are even papers on human scent contamination of wild avian nesting habitats, and how it affects the survival of the bird offspring.

Birds won't abandon a nest if it has been touched but they will abandon chicks that have been handled, chances are they already have bad genes if they can instinctually fly. Picking it up is a death knell to the little winged retards.