Since when are robins shy?

Mined from the notebooks, Friday morning, March 19, 2021. Posted Thursday morning, March 25.

When the red red robin came bob bob bobbin along four years ago: 21 degrees, 17 mph winds, snow, but today’s the day the robins have picked to move back into our bushes. The view outside the window of the Mannionville Ranch House, March 11, 2017.

They’re back. A little behind schedule. And not making their usual show about it. Our robins---the ones who spend the early weeks of spring in the holly bushes outside our living room window, before their time share is up and they turn the bushes over to the catbirds---haven’t necessarily returned from the south. All robins don’t migrate. Some do, some don’t. The ones who don’t hide out deep in the woods sheltering from the winter winds and dreaming of worms. According to my notebooks, they arrived on March 9th last year. In 2017, when I took the photo up top, they moved back in on March 11th. They’re here now. I’ve heard them, clucking and cheeping indignantly in the early morning, as if the sun has done them an affront by rising without their permission. Robins are snooty birds, puffed up, and full of themselves. They pose with their beaks in the air and look down over them at the rest of the bird world and the human world, our part of it, anyway. I’ve written before how they often glare in our window disdainfully, either from the bushes or the telephone wires, as if we’re riffraff who don’t know how to manage the property or our lives and are ruining their neighborhood with our carelessness and disorder. At any rate, like I said, I’ve heard them, but I haven’t seen them, not up close or for long. I’ve caught a couple of glimpses. One at the edge of a field as we drove by yesterday, on its own, glaring at a flock of starlings, no doubt disapproving of the starlings’ messiness, gluttony, noisiness, and presumption. The other Wednesday, the 17th, St Patrick’s Day. He or she---robins aren’t sexualy dymorphic in their plumage like cardinals and goldfinches---landed in the bushes, coming in low and fast, a black blur, and settling deep in the branches so it was out of sight when I moved closer to the window for a better look. I’ve never known robins to be shy like this in the past. This year they’re as shy---and sneaky---as leprechauns. Maybe I should get out there and dig down under the bushes to see if they’ve laid a pot of gold beneath their blue-egged nest.

Comments

[joel hanes]

The sunrise song of nesting robins always sounds petulant and complaining to me. I love it anyway; reminds me of being a pre-teen carrying a morning paper route along green avenues, before anyone else was about.