Dear Panpanpan,
I didn't realize before that you didn't understand that the Robin is a bird.
It is correctly called the "American Robin" because it's found all over North America between the tundra and the desert. In winter they leave most parts of Canada and the colder northern United States and fly to the southern states to harvest winter berries. Their mainstay food is earthworms, which they hunt on lawns. They stand stock-still with their heads cocked to one side as though listening for they prey, but they are actually discovering it by sight.
The Robin is probably our best known bird. It is a very well-loved bird here. It is about 23 - 28 cm high and has a puffed-out breast that is a fox-red or orange in colour. Its upper parts are gray-brown, its throat is white and the head and tail blackish, but paler in the female.
A lot of us regard the rich caroling of the male, uttered from a high perch, as the real sound of spring. It consists of clear rising and falling phrases, and sounds like the words "cheer-up, cheerily,". It has a beautiful liquid tone. I love its song very much. It has a call note that is a vibrant "weep". It also gives a loud "put-put-put and while flying a lisping "see-lip" sound.
It likes lawns and parks in suburbs and any wooded area. It also likes mountain meadows that are interspersed with woods.
The Robin lays three or four beautiful blue eggs in garden shrubs or booulevard trees, (in our case, under the eaves of the deck), in a cup-like nest of grasses, roots, small twigs. It makes a very neat nest. and it reinforces its nest with mud, and lines it with any fine material it finds. Early in the spring when cold threatens the eggs or little ones, (its "brood") it hides its nest low down in densely needled branches of a cedar or juniper bush. I found an empty one on the ground beside our big Douglas Fir tree, which seemed to have fallen down in a wind-storm, and was glad to see there had been no eggs or young in it yet.
During later broods, when summer heat may prostrate an incubating female, the nest is placed high in a maple or sycamore tree, where leafy branches evaporate moisure and cool the surrounding air. The amount of mud in the insulating wall is also varied according to the season. Because I thought our bird might be too hot from the early great heat we've had this year I put out the big dish of water with a little trickle from the hose running into it to make pleasant watersound to attract the bird(s), and as I said, was rewarded by seeing three or four Robins take very splashy baths. I think the dish is too deep for smaller birds. I hope to get a real bird-bath next year, and I'll get the right kind, which will be concrete that isn't slippery, and has a wide edge for birds to stand on out of the water.
I hope you and others found this a little interesting.
Warmly, Mary
