“I dreaded that first robin,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her exquisite poem, anticipating how quickly each season’s arrival simultaneously forecasts its painful departure.
But when a huge flock of hungry robins appeared at the beginning of March in the holly bushes in front of the house, their arrival brought a shock of pleasure, mixed with a pang of concern. Clearly the mild winter, both in southern states and in our corner of the country, had set the robins clock ahead by at least a week, even as we adjust our own clocks to wake in the dark of daylight savings time. But had the robins come too soon before there was enough food to sustain them?
Not to worry. The holly bushes’ dense, deep green foliage provided plenty of cover for the ravenous robins’ late winter berry plucking. For the past decade, our holly berries have been a spring stop-over for flocks of cedar waxwings, but the early bird gets the berry, as they say, especially when the ground is frozen and the worms are still deep under.
By squinting my eyes to count the approximate number of flaming holly berries in a lineal foot of the three foot high shrubs and doing some quick arithmetic, I figured there were over 8,000 berries for the flock of 40 male robins that appeared as a burst from the sky last week. That meant there were some 200 berries per robin, which at three berries per landing, they had cleanly dispatched within two days, working only half time.
If a holly berry is to a robin what a prune is to a person, you will appreciate that 200 berries a lot of fruit for a bird to consume in two days. When robins gorge themselves on the fermented berries of honeysuckle or Pyracantha (firethorn), they have been known to stagger around and fall over like your Irish uncle at a wake. Linnaeus, who gave us binomial nomenclature, assigned the Latin name Turdis migratorius to the American robin. It is the more common connotation of their scientific name, however, that seemed more fitting after our flock of robins roosted in the trees over the clotheslines in the backyard. The carpet bomb pattern of red spots on the spanking clean sheets could not have come from their red breasts.
But we can hardly complain since we have spent several small fortunes during the last decade trying to lure birds to our backyard feeders. Bird lovers, brace yourselves, but I used to call our birdfeeder a cat feeder. Six cats came with the house and the marriage, even as I wondered whether I would go to naturalist’s hell for harboring so many predators. I can now report, however, that advancing age and untimely events have worked their magic and the remaining brother and sister cats are much too stiff to catch even a junco, which being a ground feeder and slower than other songbirds, were the cats’ most reliable spring sport before meadow voles emerged from their winter hideouts.
I am sorry to say, though, that the reduced agility of the house cats has now transformed our cat feeders into squirrel feeders, and our hobby has grown alarmingly more expensive. The large plastic dome that used to protect the seed supply from the depredations of the gray squirrels unfortunately catches the wind and beats itself to death regularly when a cold front roars down off Mount Battie, so we have had to devise new defenses. First we extended the length of dowel from which we suspend the feeder so the squirrels cannot hurl themselves from the porch railing onto the rungs of the feeder. That only meant the squirrels used techniques that would impress most mountain climbers, scaling the clapboards, tight-rope walking to the end of the dowel and chewing through the line so they could consume the entire contents on the ground in a single feeding.
Okay, they want to pick a fight! So we replaced the line with wire too slippery to climb and too thick to chew through. They responded by walking out to the end of the dowel and flinging themselves onto the top of the feeder like an Olympic diver in layout position. The game of running out the back door to scare the wits out of them as they leapt 12 feet onto the frozen ground and staggered off semi-conscious soon got old, while the seed supply continued to be irresistible and our household expenses continued to increase. A friend with a similar issue reported that he had asked his gun-toting brother—in-law to put an end to his squirrel problem, which was efficiently done in the course of a morning. Only, instead of six fat squirrels dominating the feeder, there were then 20 smaller squirrels the six bigger deceased squirrels had previously kept away.
If you ask yourself how you can lose a war to an animal with a brain smaller than a walnut, you must remind yourself that these are rodents that basically can fly, and that climbing, eating and reproducing are their favorite activities. More expensive technology was clearly required. At Christmas, unbeknownst to either of us, my wife and I each gave the other a new “squirrel-proof” birdfeeder. Mine came from a National Geographic catalog and consists of a globe of stout wire surrounding the central cylinder into which you pour the seeds. Hers, which cost twice as much, had spring-loaded perches that do not support the weight of a squirrel. Hers worked; mine not so much.
On my wife’s feeder, after the tenth time the squirrel hung from its hindquarters to reach the spring-loaded perch and then tumbled ignominiously into the bushes below, he gave up. On my feeder, however, the increasingly obese gray squirrel figured out how to open the cap of the globe suspended between trees. When we had secured the cap with stout wire, a red squirrel simply slipped between the bars of the globe and feasted so messily, the gray squirrel has plenty to eat below. Clearly, National Geographic did not do any field research.
But back to the robins who are members of the thrush family, from the Latin Turdis. Thrushes are my favorite songbird for the incredible descants of melody they produce from out of their furiously beating breasts. The songs of the wood thrush and its rare cousin, the Swainson’s thrush, if you are lucky enough to live near dense conifer cover, could upstage the lead clarinet of a small town symphony orchestra. But robins are the most cheerful singers in the choir of their cousins, which is why they are known as the harbingers of spring and reminds us of Dickinson’s closing line, “Each one salutes me as he goes.”