The truth about robins

The ‘red’-breasted bird’s here year-round; we just notice them now

A female American robin gathers nesting materials at Gulpha Gorge Campground near Hot Springs.
A female American robin gathers nesting materials at Gulpha Gorge Campground near Hot Springs.

Becoming expert at bird identification requires years of study and experience, but pretty much anybody can recognize a robin.

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Special to the Democrat-Gazette

Recently hatched, orange-skinned robins are helpless, but in about two weeks they will leap from their nest and start learning to fly.

There are just so many of them for Americans to see - 350 million in the contiguous United States. This number puts them in second place behind red-winged blackbirds and in front of European starlings as North America’s most populous bird.

American robins, originally a woodland species, are content to live among humans. They nest in our yards, gathering worms in our gardens, where their bright orange breasts distinguish them from other commonly seen birds. Red-winged black birds and starlings, on the other hand, are easily confused with other types of blackbirds and do not habitually live in human neighborhoods.

Robins are familiar birds, and that familiarity breeds - not contempt, in this case, but misconceptions. Common as they are, these birds are an “unknown known” for many.

One misconception is that the robin arrives in spring. This widely held notion is fueled by poetry and songs touting the robin as a sign of spring. Literary types might think of Emily Dickinson’s “I Dreaded That First Robin So” or Canadian poet William H. Drummond’s “The First Robin.”

While spring arrivals can be typical in some northern U.S. states and Canadian provinces, robins are present in most states most of the time, including Arkansas, where robins reside year-round. (And of course from Arkansas poor little robins aren’t “Walkin’ to Missouri,” as an old song put it, but flying back and forth across the border.)

There is a central population shift northward in the spring among robins, but they do not make long migratory treks like those common among ducks, hummingbirds and cranes. They are less noticeable in the winter because they spend less time hopping in the yard and more time roosting in trees, conserving their energy.

Robins are, however, one of the first songbirds to begin nesting in the spring and can be found sitting on nests in early April.

WRONG ON ROBINS

Then there’s the pop lyric “When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along.” The robin is not red. Its breast is a deep orange. Its back is gray, and it has a disjointed white eye-ring.

Male and female robins have similar coloration, but the males have a deeper orange on the breast, while the female’s breast is a shade lighter.

An American Indian myth accounts for the robin’s deep orange breast with a legend that tells of a bird that kept a chief and his son alive through a freezing winter night by fanning the embers of a fire with its wings. Afterward, the bird was rewarded by the Creator with a glowing, flame-colored breast.

Even their name is based in a misconception. The American robin’s color patterns misled early American ornithologists, who assumed that it must be related to a common European bird, the English robin. But the English robin is a chat, or flycatcher, whereas the American robin is a thrush.

A more accurate genetic and descriptive name for the American bird would be “orange-breasted thrush.”

It’s much too late to make that change today. Besides, poets and songwriters like the name robin, and Batman’s sidekick, named after Robin Hood, would hardly seem so well dressed did he not wear a sporty orange vest.

FEATHERING THEIR NESTS

During breeding season, robins will pair off, becoming highly territorial of about one half acre where the mates nest and feed, and the male will attempt to keep other robins off that land. Otherwise they are very social, collecting into large flocks that can number more than a thousand birds that roost together at night.

Although they forage on the ground, they prefer to build their nests on horizontal structures 5 to 15 feet above the ground.

The great 19th-century ornithologist John J. Audubon painted the robin nesting in an oak tree, but nests are frequently placed in cedars or leaning dogwoods. The limbs of a tree, a window ledge or an offset in a gutter downspout are common nesting spots.

Robins’ bowl-shaped nests are built by the female in three or four days, but the male collects some of the material for construction.

The nests are made of sticks and twigs, held in place by a ring of mud smeared inside. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “All About Birds” listing for robins and the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife’s “Living With Wildlife” section on robins, the female constructs her nest from the inside out, first pressing grass and twigs into a cup. Once she has the cup started, she brings in mud, works it in with her feet, wings and bill, and then molds it with her body.

The bottoms of the nests are cushioned with soft grasses, moss, paper, thread and feathers to protect squirming fledglings from being injured by the rough, pointed twigs.

She lays three to five thumb-size, blue eggs in each clutch and incubates them by herself in 13 days. Recently hatched robins are naked with orange skin. She might raise two or three broods each summer. Each brood uses a different nest.

Both parents will defend the nests, but their best defense mechanism is to hide the nest in protected areas and to keep a vigilant watch for Cooper’s hawks and sharp shinned hawks. Robins signal other bird species about the danger of such predators.

The brown-headed cowbird will sometimes lay its egg in a robin’s nest, but robins usually evict a cowbird egg or nestling before it threatens young robins.

ATTENTIVE PARENTS

After eggs hatch, both parents feed the young birds earthworms, grubs and berries. Robins are inclined to gather insects and worms on newly mowed lawns, freshly plowed ground and the fairways of golf courses that have been recently watered. They run a few feet, then stop and study the ground, cocking their heads. Although they appear to be listening, studies have found that robins’ vision is their main hunting tool.

Adult robins carry wastes of their nestlings away from the nesting site so the odor won’t attract predators.

“A young robin’s appetite is greater while it is in the nest than at any other time in its life,” John Terres writes in his book Songbirds in Your Garden. He reports on an experiment in which a young robin ate 14 feet worth of earthworms on the last day of its nest life. Terres adds that parent robins will bring about 3 pounds of food to a brood of four young birds during the two weeks they are in the nest.

The young birds have a particular fondness for earthworms but also eat dewberries, persimmons and other fruits.

After about two weeks, the young are strong enough to leave the nest. As a robin grows toward adulthood it is not uncommon for it to fall or be pushed from the nest before it can sustain flight. In such instances the adult birds will coax the nestling to seek cover in or under a nearby bush or shrub, and then the older birds will continue to bring food to the young bird for two or three days until it can fly.

Even after a young robin can fly and gather food on its own, it sometimes follows its parents and begs for food, until the parents can wean it away. Independent young eventually join groups of male birds.

Young robins are in grave danger from cats, snakes, squirrels, crows, jays, hawks and owls. A study of robins conducted at the University of Michigan concluded that only 25 percent of the young robins reach adulthood, and that the average life span of a robin that grows to adulthood is two years. One banded robin lived for 14 years in the wild.

‘POOR LITTLE ROBIN’

In 2008 and 2009 while I was living in Hot Springs, I photographed a male robin with only one leg. It lived among a long row of hedges near the sidewalk of Bathhouse Row.

I saw that it could fly, but it preferred to hop on the ground or perch on lower limbs of the shrubs. I watched it fend off sparrows competing for scraps dropped by tourists.

Each time I was in the area I looked for my little friend, and for almost two years I spotted him routinely in the same area.

The survival of that bird for such a long time in a perilous location is a testament to the robin’s adaptability, and it is one of the reasons that, while other woodland species are in decline, the “robin goes bob, bob, bobbin’ along.”

Family, Pages 34 on 04/23/2014

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