“Hey, you guys,” Marian said in her stereotypic accent straight from Queens, NYC. “Where’d all the robins go?” Several of us young Zoology graduate students had gathered in the hallway, sipping coffee and catching up. It was early October. Marian had been in the Midwest for about eight weeks and her accent contrasted markedly with our Midwestern dialect.
Becky and I looked at each other. “What was that?” Becky asked.
“The robins,” Marian reiterated, only it sounded more like “wobins”. “Where did they go? I haven’t seen one for a couple of weeks.”
“Uh, they migrate,” Becky answered, wondering if she needed to spell things out for a Zoology grad student. “They fly south for the winter.”
“No way,” Marian exclaimed. “Our robins never leave!”
Of all the birds migrating to southern climes in the fall, American Robins are the most noticeable. They travel in large flocks; in transit, they mill about in suburban yards, gobbling up any remaining summer berries; and a stray phrase or two of their melodic territorial song can produce a melancholy attuned to cascading yellow leaves and a somber gray sky.
The American Robin has a range as broad as the North American continent and they breed as far north as northern Alaska. Most robins breeding north of the northern tier of states leave their summer territories and become short to mid-distance migrators to Mexico and the southern United States. But many robins, especially in the southern parts, opt to remain in place.
Birds need food and water in order to stay on their summer breeding grounds. They migrate because their food source is not available in winter, not because they can’t survive winter temperatures. Robins possess thick down feathers that insulates sufficiently to maintain a body temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Robins can eat snow, when water in its liquid form is absent. But consider the robin diet: they are omnivores, eating a wide variety of fruits like chokeberry, hawthorn, dogwood and sumac. They hop on lawns, turning a large eye on burrowing earthworms, and supplement this balanced diet with a variety of insects.
None of these foods are accessible in winter, especially with a snow cover. Before the winter sets in, migrators will take off; and birds remaining in the area may move to moist woods that have a residue of berries left. Non-migratory robins may also seek out low-lying valleys and swamps, where there is less wind. Some birds remain close to the summer’s nesting territory to nudge out competitors in the spring.
Robins can migrate in the day or night, but the pattern seems to be daytime migration in the fall, and at night in the spring. They have been clocked at 30 miles per hour and average about 38 miles a day.
As I write this, I have dozens of robins hopping about in our yard. These are the robins that bred in northern Canada, perhaps, or the northern coast of Alaska. They have come so far already, hundreds of miles. They drink and bathe in the birdbath, and investigate possible edibles under the leaf layer. They are drawn to our crab apple tree to feast on the little ornamental fruit. It pleases me to see that Tom’s thoughtful plantings twenty years ago are feeding these wild birds that dropped into our yard to rest and refuel.
Migration is a notorious phenomenon to investigate, comprised as it is of the movement of small bodies through a vast three-dimensional space, so we still don’t fully understand it. I will be as surprised as anyone to step outside one morning, and sense an emptiness around me. The woods will be quiet and the robins will have disappeared without a trace. One couldn’t anticipate their leaving.
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