Stick with this short clip past your initial reaction of "omg teeny guitars!" -- your reward will be a really funny mélange of songs that proves All Songs Are One. Enjoy!
I was away at a conference last week, and the song "Cheerio! Cheerio!" greeted me on my return, from all the surrounding bushes and trees. Why, you may ask? Because our robins had grown up in my absence, of course.
It only takes two weeks to go from tiny blue egg to frumpy-looking teenager, if you're an American Robin. My husband took some pics which I will share with you here, so that you will see how our nestlings fared while I was away.
The above photo may be slightly out of focus, but then again, these babies are pretty out of it themselves, aren't they. Well, they're on the ball when their mama arrives with a worm, of course, stretching their thin little necks up and opening their big yellow mouths wide. Below is another photo of the nest on that day.
Only a couple of days later, you can really see the change as the nest gets very crowded and the birds' feathers continue to develop. They start to open their eyes and take a personal interest in affairs around them.
My husband missed the actual moment when these messy creatures leapt from their safe platform into the surrounding landscape. Fuzzy new robins abandon their natal homes before they can actually fly, which seems quite inadvisable to me, but they have never consulted my wisdom on this or any matter. They take up stations under bushes, in window wells, in the shadows of rocks, and so forth, and continue to make loud demands for food from their parents.
Robin parents go along with this arrangement and continue to deliver food to their offspring for some days after the nest is empty. Our last view of a given family is often a crowd of them pestering a parent on a tree branch until they get firmly pecked away. Then they start to fend for themselves, and the parents get busy on brood number two. From what I've seen, robins will raise three broods each year if they can get away with it.
I also recently learned that robins flock and are very gregarious during their southern migration and while they are vacationing over the winter. The relatively solitary behaviour I've observed in them is natural to them when they are in their northern breeding grounds.
Here's a slightly clearer picture of our robin acquaintance. She's putting up with us a bit more now that her eggs have hatched.
Robins ignore their first egg or two for a day after they are laid. Then they lay another egg or two. This way, they can be sure that all the eggs will hatch at basically the same time, giving all the hatchlings the best chance of survival. So, a couple of days ago, this situation obtained in the nest:
And then, next time we peeked:
Four absurd hatchlings! Can you even sort them out? They have dark eye capsules and darkish stubs where their wings will be. Have you ever seen such helpless little objects? Thank goodness for the robin mama, is all I can say.
We disturb the robin as little as possible, but once a day I have to open the front door (or come around the front) to get the newspaper and check my mail. So that's when my husband takes pictures. While he stretches up, standing on the porch railing and steadying the camera on the porch ceiling, the robin disapproves of us from a nearby tree branch, as follows:
I have met brave robin mamas who will tolerate a fairly close approach, but this one, this spring, will take off to the nearby spruce tree at the smallest sign of us. So we took this indistinct shot of her through our closed front door and screen door -- and you can tell she is still wise to our lies!
Lifetime
Cooper's Hawk
