And now for something completely…common.
Naturalist’s Notebook Entry #1: The American Robin, which gets my vote as the most typically American bird.
I once fed a wild bird from my hand. It was an American robin, and I was stretched out, belly-on-grass, next to a boxwood up near a neighbor’s house, my arm out, palm up, with an earthworm on offer as if the robin were some avian god.
The robin did as robins do. She cocked her head, as if listening to the wriggling in my hand, her upper, outer eye looking out for danger, beginning with this strange creature crawling about and making odd sounds. “It’s okay, Miss Robin, I promise. It’s okay. Go ahead.” She did as robins do, and plucked the worm with a quick little jab and grab, a yellow-gold beak with a dark fleck near the tip grasping the worm and then, head tilting back, some quick flicks of the head dropped the worm into a pink maw that led to her gullet and, for the worm, whatever await annelids on the other side of here.
I grinned, and lay still. The robin stared for a moment at me, then looked into my palm, empty except for a few crumbs of moist earth. With steps so quick I couldn’t really make out the legs moving, she ran a couple yards away, along the row of boxwoods. She looked about with quick jerks of her head, and ran a few feet more. I pressed to the low position of a push-up and slowly and clumsily scuttled back a few feet, then went to all-fours, hands and knees, and watched the robin as she foraged amongst mulch and leaves and grass. After a few moments I crawled a bit further, then stood, brushed off the knees of my pants, and looked about, wondering if any of the neighbors had witnessed the event and were contemplating whether to call the police.
Robins, I believe, deserve a closer look than we typically give them. Take a look at the eye in the photo. That bird appears to have an attitude of the She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed variety, with a haughty cock of the head to emphasize the point, and a beak which is all business. The orange breast asks to be puffed out. This is a bird that is quite serious about being a bird, and tolerating no suggestions otherwise. Who can doubt that there’s some no-nonsense dinosaur DNA inside? And I for one don’t doubt that she wants, when the word bird crosses my mind, for me to pull this image from the memory bank.
The American robin is, as North American birds go, certainly among the most cosmopolitan of species. They can be seen year-round throughout the vast majority of the lower 48 states, and in the warmer breeding months they can be found as far north as the Arctic Circle; even Central America hosts some during winter. In the contiguous states of the U.S., calling the robin “a sign of spring” is generally a sign that one hasn’t really paid attention, for robins can be seen through winter through most of their range—but instead of patrolling green lawns for worms and bugs, building nests, and raising chicks, they’re doing more foraging in woods and roosting in flocks, some of which can number into the thousands. I’ve seen robins on beaches in Florida and in pine trees in the mountains of Montana, on islands in the Minnesota Boundary Waters and on a rain-slick Seattle street. Capt. Meriwether Lewis, joint leader of the Voyage of Discovery, aka the Lewis and Clark expedition, reported them as “singing very agreably” the morning of March 15, 1806, at their encampment near Fort Clatsop, at the mouth of the Columbia River. They’re rare in the desert and uncommon in the high-heat short grass plains, but without the wonders of major hydrological engineering, so are we. Like us, they sometimes take advantage of our water-collection-and-diversion efforts and winter over near Phoenix golf courses or up near Sedona. And like saner humans they tend to abandon Phoenix during the summer. They are superbly adaptable, and more than reasonably tolerant of humans, just as much at home in suburbia as in wilderness. Robins will nest under the eaves of a house and in the branches of a tree fifty miles from any building, at sea level and at elevations nearly as high as trees will grow, and in all sorts of bushes, brambles, and more in between.
According to those who most reliably assess bird populations, there are about 375 million American robins in North America. Unlike many bird species, robins have increased in number over the last few decades, and, per those same bird-counting authorities, the American robin is the most plentiful avian species in North America. I was relieved to learn that, as I might have guessed that the most numerous might be either the house sparrow or the European starling, both non-natives which are very broadly naturalized through much of the U. S. If one goes to Home Depot, I recommend wearing a hat even inside, where house sparrows routinely claim squatter’s rights. And don’t get me going about starlings. Yeah, murmurations are cool to watch, but I’d rather see big swarms of native birds, not flashy-feathered little Euro thugs.
Most birders attribute the large number of American robins to their environmental adaptability and reliable fecundity. A pair will raise as many as three broods in a single season, with 3-5 young per nest. In-nest mortality for the young is high, however. Common nest predators include domestic (or feral) house cats, other birds, such as blue jays, grackles, and hawks, large and small, raccoons and other small mammal carnivores, and even snakes. About 1/4 to 1/3 of young survive to adulthood.
Young robins hatch about 13-14 days after laying. Two weeks later, they’ve left the nest, but are not independent. They will hide and move, parents tracking their whereabouts and bringing food, whilst the young develop skills of flight and foraging. Juveniles soon develop the basic, though muted, coloration of their kind, along with a liberal sprinkling of spots across the breast. (This dotted front evokes the markings of their thrush kin-birds.) Even as their size approaches that of an adult, however, they get much of their food from parental handouts, while at the same time observing those parents doing the necessary foraging. The behavior prompts thoughts of human youngsters eating their way through the grocery store, towed by a parent. During this near-ground phase of growing up, robin parents will call and make a ruckus to distract potential predators, while alerting the young to the need to hide. Here I should say what shouldn’t need saying: if you come across a young robin, don’t try to ‘rescue’ or ‘save’ it. Ma and Pa are almost certainly nearby, and will do a much better job of parenting their young than we can.
American robins have a sweet, clear song, familiar to anyone spending time outside early in the day, in the spring and early summer. The songs have a common character—a “cheerily, cheer, cheer, cheer-up” sort of theme, but with variation1. They also will utter a series of “tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk” sounds, or a sharp single “tseet” as an alert or warning call.
While we call them robins, they are not especially close relatives of the European robin, which also has an orange breast, but is a gnat-catcher, not a thrush. The American robin is a thrush, a ‘true thrush’, as those in the genus are often called, and it is a genus with an unfortunate name: Turdus, which, thankfully, is simply Latin for ‘thrush’. That the species is largely a stay-at-home, year-round resident through most of their range belies their specific appellation: migratorius. Yes, some migrate, but as a species, they’re not especially notable for such.
American robins share body shape and general appearance with other thrushes; thumb through just about any bird guide, and it’ll soon be clear that with the thrushes is where they belong, though one will discover a pair of thrushes native to Central America, occasionally finding their way across the Rio Grande, also called robins, and that the spotted thrushes of North America—and some other thrushes through Central and South America—are mostly in a separate genus—Catharus. A better name for the American robin might be “suburban lawn thrush”, given behavior and where we most frequently see them, but I give it no chance, tradition and habit being what they are.
Both Turdus and Catharus and several other genera are within the taxonomic family Turdidae, which, although it looks like it should sound like the result of a good and regular high-fiber diet, is the broader group of thrushes (sometimes called the nightingale-thrushes) which includes another North American bird known for its red breast—the Eastern bluebird, of which the males are, like American robins, a bit brighter and bolder in coloration than the females, only in the bluebird, even moreso.
John James Audubon produced at least a couple illustrations of the American robin; an early one of a single bird is not especially masterful or educational, and a later image, of the more typical Audubon sort, that, frankly, causes yours truly to wonder why the accepted opinion is generally that Audubon was some sort of master bird illustrator, when there’s a significant pile of evidence suggesting we’d be better off moving on. His depiction of a flamingo, distorted as all get out, would be Exhibit A. But here’s his American Robin illustration of 1832, housed at the National Gallery of Art. The wrinkled-cowl appearance of the female clutching the berry is befuddling in its unreality, and the wavy appearance of the male’s breast is equally mystifying. One concedes that many of the basics are at least presented—clutch size, the basic construction of the nest, and, while robins are more typically vermivorous/insectivorous, they will gladly eat berries and small fruits. (As I write this, there’s at least a half-dozen robins in each of a couple native black cherry trees in our back yard, gorging on the drupes that have spent the summer ripening. The birds do a tremendous job of spreading the seed-pits far and wide. I don’t know what we’re to think the fruit is, but it’s not from the tree in which they’re depicted, a chestnut oak—itself a bit of a mess, too, actually.
Here (below) is another Audubon robin, from 25 years earlier. Not nearly as refined a technique, but in some ways less distorted, ignoring, let us grant, the flat-bottomed skiff appearance. The eggs, however, are a problem. Robin’s egg blue is a pretty pale blue to almost turquoise color, not ocean-depths-at-night blue, and what’s with the black splotches? And the shape?
The ubiquity of American robins and their common propinquity to humans affects our perception of them, and, to a related extent, how we treat them.
Many Americans of a certain age can readily recall childhood days when monarch butterflies, despite their manifest magnificence, were considered kind of ho-hum. Yes, they were cool, like the other side of the pillow, but, like pillows, they were commonly encountered. Then came the slow-motion crash of the North American monarch. Primarily because of habitat loss and pesticide use, the population of monarch butterflies has dropped precipitously and far—in many areas, by more than 90%. Now, when I see a monarch flapping about in our garden—in which monarch-attracting plants are emphasized—it is cause for rejoicing. There’s a real, significant chance that monarchs could become extinct in North America. That this is the case should cause all of us some sleepless nights, I think.
Could the same thing happen to our lovable and taken for granted American robin? Suburban herbicide and pesticide use in the U.S. is ridiculously high; a dandelion in the yard, and mere rumors of crabgrass in the neighborhood lead to spraying and spreading of herbicides at what were once industrial farm levels. Now industrial farms might be coming second to some suburban lawns. “Treating” lawns and gardens for bug pests is also big business. In many cases, the pesticides are described as “natural”, the reasoning being that chrysanthemums and related plants produce pyrethrins that do have innate insecticidal and repellent properties, and the compounds that the companies want to apply to your yard are commonly pyrethroids—man-made chemicals similar to pyrethrins, but typically with greater killing capacity and much greater persistence in the environment. There are many different pyrethroids on the market, and more are constantly being developed. Some are better at killing hornets and wasps than ants and roaches, others the other way ‘round, yet others are more lethal to spiders, etc., etc. But it’s like hunting firearms: yeah, this one is better for deer hunting than duck hunting, that one’s better for elk than rabbit, and so forth. But they’ll all kill quite a lot of the things at which they are fired. So it is with broad-spectrum pyrethroid pesticides. The guy from Mosquitoes No More will say their treatments “target” mosquitoes and ticks, but that’s kinda like the napalm salesman saying their product targets leaf-bearing plants. Scorched earth is still scorched earth, regardless of what was targeted. Broad-spectrum pyrethroids kill mosquitoes, ticks, spiders, wasps, bees, flies, butterflies, moths, pill bugs, and most other things with more than four legs—some more efficiently than others, but who cares if a population is wiped out somewhat less efficiently?
Since my friend the American robin feeds mostly on worms and bugs, it’s potentially a big deal. If one simply wipes out the buffet line at Joy Luck Chinese Restaurant, and there’s nowhere else to eat, those who used to enjoy the shrimp fried rice at Joy Luck are gonna find themselves on a starvation diet. If the worms and bugs are removed, so will be the robins. We’d all be the poorer for it.
Robins were often celebrated in popular poetry of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, though most often the species being written of is the European robin, as in Blake’s “A Robin Redbreast in a cage/Puts all Heaven in a rage….” Emily Dickinson featured robins in several short poems, none of which are among her better issue, and she commonly references their status as harbingers of spring, as unwarranted as such might be. From my own childhood perhaps the most notable reference in poem or song would be the Michael Jackson hit, “Rockin’ Robin”, a 1972 remake of the Bobby Day hit from 1958, and which, as it did for Bobby, peaked for Michael at number 2 on the Billboard charts. (Note to any youngsters unsure what ‘the Billboard charts’ were—just ask somebody who remembers the Beatles. And if you’re not sure who Michael Jackson was—oh, just never mind.) Here’s Bobby Day (fast forward to about 1:28 to get past the intro to the song itself):
Enjoy!
The Macaulay Library of bird sounds and images hosted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is an incredibly splendid resource for this sort of thing. I haven’t yet figured out how to acquire permission for use and suitably embed their audio here, but I highly recommend the site.
O joy!
I love your ode to the robin
hahaha and jitterbugging to Rockin' Robin
topped it off in splendor