The Red, Red Robins

I heard a robin this morning
I'm feeling happy today
Gonna pack my cares in a whistle
And blow them all away ....  

When the red, red robin
comes bob, bobbin'
along, along
They'll be no more sobbing'
when he starts throbbing'
his old sweet song 

Wake up, wake up you sleepy head!
Get up, get out o' bed!
Cheer up, cheer up the sun is red,
Live, love, laugh and be happy!
     -- Harry MacGregor Woods, 1926

It's time for my annual posting on the Robins. With abundant earthworms, insects and a large variety berries (especially the now-ripening prunus avium or "bird cherry"), we regularly have one or more pairs of robins nesting in our yard. And when they are here, that catchy tune inevitably plays repeatedly in my head. (For fun, listen to the original recording by Al Jolson in 1926 (below), or later versions by Bing Crosby, Doris Day, and Louis Armstrong).

 

And then there are the songs of the robins themselves. For a month now, we've been listening to the male sing his heart out in nearby trees, especially around dusk. A pair had already begun to build a nest on the rafter supporting the grape vines near the deck. We're not sure whether he lost his mate and was trying to attract another, or was singing to assert claim to his territory. In any event, the nest-building eventually resumed, and last week ago, I noticed the hungry chirr-chirr-chirr of hatchlings in the nest.

June 26, 2015

The dense foliage of the grape leaves was likely an asset to the robins seeking to shelter their young from predators. But it made it more challenging to take photographs than when they use one of the nest boxes. Still, two are quite visible, and if you look carefully there's a third beak in the lower left. The female has also decorated the nest with blue plastic strips from one of our more-tattered tarps. (She scrounged these from a left-over nest in one of the nest boxes.)

Three hatchlings, June 26, 2015

Yesterday, the first of brood fledged, on a wet, chilly day that left it shivering. It caught my attention when it grabbed onto the living room screen door on the way down, then landed safely on the deck. Its mom soon returned, with first a large cherry in her beak, and then a still-wriggling worm for its siblings.

The first to fledge, June 27, 2015

This morning, the other robins had fledged as well. Unfortunately, one of them wound up partially dismembered outside our front door, a gift left for us by one of the cats. But as my friend Beth says, the survival rate for robin fledglings is notoriously low -- the reason robin pairs have 2-3 broods each breeding season. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, only 40% of robin nests successfully produce young, and only 25% of those that fledge survive through November.

A few other fun notes from the "Lab of O" site: Robins eat different kinds of food depending on the time of day -- more earthworms in the morning and more fruit in the afternoon. And when robins eat exclusively honeysuckle berries, they can be become intoxicated.

I wonder what an intoxicated robin looks like? But with the great diversity of Juneberry, cherry, chokecherry, dogwood and other berries in yard, I may never find out.