| from the April 19, 2009 Newsletter, issued from the
Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon: ROBINS HERE, TOO Travelers like to see new things but maybe just as important is to gain new perspectives on what makes up everyday life back home. That's the way it is when I travel and see American Robins, TURDUS MIGRATORIUS. Few songbirds are more familiar, yet there's always more to know about them, more to appreciate about them. When I was a kid in Kentucky robins were the birds hopping around looking for earthworms in our lawn. During my hermiting days in Mississippi in the fall they flocked in big Pecan trees above my trailer alternately basking in sunlight and gorging themselves on Poison Ivy fruits. The first bird I saw here was a robin. If you're in a robinless part of the world you can see what the one outside my door looks like below:
Mature adult males in summer wear darker gray upperparts than the one in the picture, and their breasts are more intensely orange. Here's what we read on A.C. Bent's Robin Page in Life Histories of Familiar North American Birds online for free at http://birdsbybent.com/ch31-40/robin.html.
Those words were published in a Smithsonian museum bulletin in 1949. I relish the old naturalists' way of putting their hearts into such descriptions, offering a richness of detail no modern technical journal would permit for fear of being accused of unscientific anthropomorphism. But, what a picture of the robin those words paint! If you want to see your common backyard robin from several new perspectives, go read that Robin page linked to above. from the November 18, 2001 Newsletter, issued from near
Natchez, Mississippi: However, here these flock visitations are something special. For, these are the first American Robins I have seen all year. Last spring I participated in a major migratory-birdcount lasting several months, during which time each Friday I counted every migratory bird I saw or heard. There was not a single American Robin among them. Nor have I seen one all summer. I'm really not sure why this is so. Though I haven't been in Natchez enough to know for sure, I suspect that American Robins are common there, at least during the summer. These American Robins have profoundly split personalities. The sleek, nervous, gregarious birds in my Pecan trees are very different creatures from the round-chested, turf-hopping earthworm-pullers found in America's summery suburban lawns. During nesting time those summer birds defend lawn-and-hedge territories and fight epic battles with neighboring robins who venture too close to their claim. If you're lying in a lawn chair, an American Robin may fearlessly hop to within just a few feet of you, glaring at you as it pulls up earthworms. But in the fall these birds become their opposites. They forsake their boundary fights and unite into the kinds of noisy, loose-knit flocks that now visit my Pecan trees. They grow skittish. This morning as they created a cacophony of busy chattering among themselves, when I snapped a small limb for firewood every bird escaped to other trees. Their diet also changes. Their obsession for earthworms and other animals becomes an obsession for vegetarian fare. One study found that in the spring vegetable matter constitutes only 21% of their food, while during the fall it rises to 81%. Sometimes I amuse myself with the thought that each year American Robins alternate between "extreme conservative" behavior, and "extreme liberal." In the summer each bird is the daring individualist defending his privately proclaimed plot of land, singing incessantly of home and family. They are true red-meat Republican birds. But then winter makes them all into shifty vegetarian communists who disdain personal property and spend their days flocking from one easy meal to the next. What this means to me is that Mother Nature finds that sometimes the right-wing approach works, other times the left-wing approach works. As is the case so often in nature, diveristy hand in hand with pragmatism equals survival. Though in most of the US American Robins can always be found, they are migrators -- their Latin name is TURDUS MIGRATORIUS. During the summer they are distributed from northern Canada south to about here. Then during the winter their distribution shifts southward. Their northern boundary lies somewhat south of the US/Canada border, but their southern distribution extends as far as Guatemala. My bird fieldguide shows the American Robin's southern distribution line going right through the Natchez area. Maybe a local Newsletter reader will send me a mail saying whether Natchez lawns are graced with American Robins during our summers. from the February 23, 2003 Newsletter, issued from near
Natchez, Mississippi: Chinaberry, MELIA AZEDARACH, is another introduced plant abundant at Laurel Hill, and especially conspicuous at this time of year. Now the short-lived trees are leafless but among their upper limbs they bear basketball-size, diffuse clusters of whitish fruits. Friday's robins made a racket issuing nasal tik-calls as the feasted upon the fruits. While calling they would stretch from their perches to reach the fruits or else fly up to a fruit, nab it in midair, then instantly returning to their perch. The birds were pretty persnickety about what they collected, for about half the time, after they had held the fruit in their beaks for about a second, they would simply drop their prize onto the forest floor and choose another. If the fruit was OK, the bird snapped back his head and gulped down the fruit whole, which was something to see, for one wouldn't think a robin could swallow such a relatively large fruit. To me the fruits seem entirely too pithy and stinky to consider even nibbling. Clearly, robins have another opinion. from the July 5, 2009 Newsletter, issued from the
Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon, USA: |
