BIT-101

Robins

Background

A few years ago I build a wood shed in my back yard. it’s just an open structure to stack logs in, with a roof to keep out the rain. I made a shelf at the top for storing sticks for kindling. I walk past this shed several times a day - whenever I leave the house or come home.

First sighting

In late April, I was coming back from a dog walk and a bird flew out of the top of the shed. When I looked closer, I saw a bird’s nest in amongst the kindling sticks. The bird was an American robin. Note, these are very different birds from what gets called a robin in the UK and other areas (the European robin). I’d often read about how cute and fluffy robins are and it never made sense to me. American robins are stern looking, business-like birds. Not ugly, but they always look very serious and slightly annoyed. Eventually I discovered that these are not the same robins others were talking about. Anyway, cool! A nest right there at eye level. I did some reading to find out what was going on there.

What I read

Some facts about robins:

• Robins couples are monogomous for a single mating season. The next year they choose new partners.
• They don’t live in nests. They sleep and rest in trees, on branches. The nests are solely for laying and hatching eggs and raising the babies.
• The female robin does most of the nest building, though the male often helps gathering materials - grass, string, mud.
• Once the nest is built, the mother moves in and stays there for the cycle of one batch of young.
• The male stays nearby and keeps an eye on things, defending the nest as much as he is able.
• The mother robin will lay anywhere from two to seven eggs, three or four being most common.
• The eggs hatch after 12-14 days, at which point, the mother will spend most of her time gathering food (worms, bugs) and feeding them. The father might help get food for them now and then as well.
• About two weeks after hatching, the babies will be ready to start flying. Soon after that, they are off on their own.
• The parents then abandon that nest and build a new one for the next round of babies. They may have as many as three or four nests in a season.

What I saw

From there on, every day I would see the mother sitting on the nest. She’d generally fly away as I walked by, which I felt bad about. But that was how I left my house and came back. After a while she did start to get somewhat used to us and if we moved slowly and passed by as far from the shed as we could get, she would often stay in the nest and eye us carefully.

After a week or so, eggs!

Three tiny, perfect blue eggs.

Some notes on the photos:

• Some of the photos, like the above, are very close up and taken from right above the nest. I never purposely scared the mother away. I only approached if she was not there. I held my phone up, took a photo and was out of there in two seconds. I did not touch the nest, its contents, or its surroundings.
• All other photos were taken at high zoom from at least 20 feet away, sometimes from the yard, sometimes from a window.
• In some of the photos the inside of the nest looks very red. That’s just a reflection of the red stain on the shed itself, where the natural light did not reach. It’s not blood!

After the eggs, the mother was almost always sitting on the nest. I imagine the did the bare minimum foraging to feed herself, but otherwise she was right there.

Right on schedule, about two weeks after I saw the first eggs, they hatched. At first we just noticed that the mother was not always sitting down in the nest, but sitting higher or on the edge of the nest.

Eventually I discovered three very tiny, ugly, pink, fuzzy creatures.

And the feeding began. At first, mother robin was still mostly sitting on the nest, but more and more often she’d be away getting food.

Within a week, they went from being amorphous lumps to looking like birds. Very hungry birds.

Sometimes when they were sated, they even started showing some curiosity about the world outside the nest.

In the second week after hatching, I was shocked at how much they had grown.

At this point, the mother was at the nest about half the time at best. She’d appear, spend a few minutes shoving food down her babies throats and fly off to get more.

And at this point I started seeing the father more often. One time while I was taking zoomed in photos from a good 20-25 feet away, he swooped down, landed on the ground right in front of me, scolded me loudly and flew away. Go Dad!

This was the last photo I got of them. They barely fit in the nest after two full weeks of growing. Then over the course of a day or two, we saw the babies fly out of the nest, one by one. Both parents were right there watching over them and screaming loudly at anything in the vicinity.

And then… literal empty nest. I can’t say I was sad exactly. But I missed looking out for them every time I went outside. The nest was abandoned and the wood shed was just a wood shed. The abandonment was just so sudden though. I thought they’d do some test flights for a few days or so, but still come back to the nest. Nope. They were gone and never returned.

I do wonder if they are ok. All three hatched, grew up perfectly and flew off on their own, so I’m assuming they are just getting on with their lives.

Anyway, it was a magical month. I’ll never look at robins the same. And every time I see one in the neighborhood, I’ll wonder if it’s one of “mine”.

I leave you with a bonus video of feeding time.

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