Kingdom Come Deliverance Bird in the Hand Guide

As a nobody without lands or titles to your name in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, you can expect to do a lot of menial tasks as you kick off your journey toward vengeance. As such, A Bird In the Hand is one of the earliest Kingdom Come Deliverance side quests you can pick up, although unfortunately at launch, this is also one of the buggiest and most glitched quests in the game!

To make a long story short, it turns out a huntsman lost some valuable birds (some nightengales, it seems) that he’d like to trade to the nobility — and you are just the wet-behind-the-ears, expendable adventurer who could do all the work for him!

The quest seems easy enough, requiring you to locate three nightingales by sound and then set down some cage traps. But all is not as it seems. Having trouble capturing the nightingales and finishing A Bird In The Hand? We show you exactly how to finish this quest below — and get around the buggy glitch!

Completing The Kingdom Come Deliverance Bird Quest

If you haven’t found this KCD side quest yet, just head over to the east side of Rattay and talk to the huntsman named Berthold (his building is across from the tavern and is marked by a horn on the map). 

From there, head over to the woods east of Vranik (marked on your map) and walk around until you hear the call of the nightingale that Berthold taught you.

The solution to A Bird in the Hand is actually stunningly simple. You don’t press any special button or access a prompt to use the traps: you literally just go into the inventory and drop the cage at the location where the Nightingale chirp is loudest.

You don’t have to be at the exact spot either — just being in the vicinity where you hear the loudest sound will do.

 Pick up this Kingdom Come Deliverance side quest in Rattay!

The simplest way to get all three birds is to drop the cage, walk away slightly, wait an hour, and then pick up the cage, which should now have the bird. Repeat the process for the other two Nightingales by following their audible calls. Note: If you are with a horse when you wait, the cage will frequently glitch out and spawn under the horse, so look there first.

Dropping cages and then picking them back up sounds really incredibly easy, right? Well, turns out there’s a hitch in this simple plan…

A Bird In The Hand Glitch

Dropping the cages is supposed to trap the birds, and the filled cages should show up as quest objectives on your map. Except that sometimes, they just plain don’t because of the Nightingale bug.

Yep, the cages will frequently disappear entirely with no way to pick them back up or locate where you dropped them. Be sure to save your game with a Saviour Schanpps right before starting the quest so you don’t end up having to talk to the huntsman and travel between locations over and over again. 

When you wait and return to the spot where you dropped the trap, it should appear as a quest marker on the map. If it doesn’t, it’s a glitch. Just load your save and start again.

However, there’s even more trouble on the horizon as well, as turning in the quest doesn’t seem to be working properly, either. This is critical — don’t save your game after grabbing the third bird. Saving at this point in A Bird In The Hand seems to glitch the quest and permanently prevent you from completing it!

Instead, circumvent the bug entirely by marching directly back to Rattay and turn in the birds without going anywhere else to have the most chance of successfully completing the quest.

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Have you found any other workarounds for the glitched A Bird In The Hand quest? Let us know and we’ll update this article with more infor on the bug! For those still getting used to this non-traditional RPG’s mechanics, be sure to also check out our beginner’s guide to combat, persuasion, and more right here.