Robin: The Gateway Bird

Robins are the gateway drug of the birding world, meaning they are often one of the first birds that suck people into devoting years of their lives to watching, lifelisting, and loving our avian companions. Easy to recognize, melodic, fascinating, and often right outside one’s residence, robins are the ubiquitous urban bird, and may often be the only bird species recognized by non-birders and even those who could care less about the natural world. And, yet, robins are also overlooked and under appreciated.

Consider Mr. Bird himself, John James Audubon, who wrote of robins as “fat and juicy, and afford excellent eating.” Alas, I don’t think we have any info on what recipes he used. In the Birds of America, the author (it’s an edited book so I don’t know who wrote which part) uses robins as an example of “the curious and stupid things a bird may do in the way of nest-building.” The example centers on a robin building a nest in a shed that sat on a turntable, which led to the bird building nests at either end with two sets of eggs. I am not sure this qualifies as stupid, or simply a good mother-to-be.

JJ Audubon’s drawings of Robin…before eating them. But to give him credit, he did appreciate the birds, too.

Robins, though, had fans closer to my home. William Leon Dawson wrote in The Birds of Washington: “He is part and parcel of springtime, chief herald, chief poet, and lord high reveler of that joyful season. It is a merry day when the first flock of Robins turns itself loose on the home landscape.” (As much as I like modern field guides, most of them lack such evocative and colorful writing, which is too bad.) Robins have indeed, as Dawson also noticed, cast their lot with ours, for better or worse, and taken to gracing the urban environment with their presence.

In case you didn’t know, the scientific name for robins (technically the American Robin) is Turdus migratorius. Turdus has ancient roots stretching back to Latin when, back in the day, apparently Roman bird lovers knew the bird as turdus, which makes me wonder why and where that name originated. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word turd goes deeper still, from the proto-Indo-European drtom, from the past participle of der (“that which is separated”), and thus appears to relate to something cleaved or sheared from one’s body, which is certainly a fine description of a turd.

In contrast, migratorius relates directly to the species propensity for travel; after all, Dawson was reveling in the robins’ return to the home front. Some travel north, others head to the mountains, but many stay put, taking advantage of how we have created excellent homes that they can inhabit year round. Unfortunately, we don’t have much specific data on where robins move so it’s not clear if the birds in your yard are the same as the ones you see in other areas.

That they do migrate and are not merely yardbirds is one my favorite aspects of robins. I always enjoy seeing them in the mountains. Recently I encountered robins east of Stevens Pass eating thimbleberries. (I also was enjoying these slightly tart, slightly effervescent fruits, which I had not encountered in such lushness and yumminess.) I have also seen robins above timberline throughout the Cascades, deep in the forest, and out in the exposed blast zones around Mount St. Helens. (I like to think that some of these birds visited my yard but that’s the optimistic kind of fool I am.) Adaptable and resilient (they survived being killed by the thousands for food and sport), robins are certainly birds worth watching and admiring.

For example, watch one foraging in your yard for earthworms. Experiments show that they rely primarily on visual clues and maybe auditory and vibrational clues, as well. When a bird cocks her head, she does so to give one eye at a time a full view, which aids the worm hunter in a direct and correct nabbing of the impending meal with her bill. A pretty darned nifty way to find your next meal. Drill baby drill.

A robin up toward the alpine zone at Mt. Rainier.

Almost 20 years ago, in my first book of essays about Seattle, I wrote of what I called the ignorance of the common, a phrase adapted from Robert Michael Pyle’s extinction of experience. Both ideas center on paying attention to the world right around us, to what and who we share our environment with, and to taking advantage of nearby nature to learn, to be amazed, to celebrate. In doing so, not only do we strengthen our connections to our local place but also to the wider world as we better understand the ecological strands that bind our planet together. So go out and check out your local robins; I suspect you’ll be surprised and pleased.