As most of you must know, birding is a dangerous pasttime - mostly due to the risk of a certain obsessiveness. And the various pitfalls, I mean the literal pitfalls - roots, rocks, puddles, small children under your feet - as you look skyward with your binoculars glued to your eyes. Last week I missed my usual blog day due to a a birding mishap common in my New England region. I contracted one of the tick-borne diseases, probably anaplasmosis, and, all kidding aside, was quite ill for a number of days. This was complicated at first by the possibility my symptoms might be COVID. Fortunately not, and fortunately I had a treatable though serious condition. (If you aren’t familiar with it, click on the link and read about it, if you live in a tick infested region.)
Last week, robins were in my blog sights. The robin must have been the earliest and only bird on my life list from about age 3 in Illinois to around age 26 when I bought my first bird feeder in Michigan. American robins are members of the thrush family along with bluebirds, veerys (yes, double “e”), thrushes, and a few less familiar species, and they nest, breed, feed, and sing literally everywhere in the continental United States. I thought: “They’re too common and familiar; no one wants to read a blog about robins.” But, robins are iconic, and in the spring and fall they turn up in such large flocks in our yard and the nearby fields chortling amiably as they browse for worms, that I wanted to honor their presence.
While most of the robins’ thrush brethren have thrush names, the many robin species of the world are not thrushes and have no familial relation to the American robin. In fact early European colonists christened robins with their name because they thought they resembled the European robin due to its bright breast. The term robin red-beast was coined in England referring to the European robin, which is a chat not a thrush.
Our American robin remains a harbinger of spring in many localities though robins may also reside throughout the year nearly everywhere in the US. When migrations occur, they may be short and regional or they may extend over long distances. Much depends on local conditions of food, shelter, and weather. Perhaps their reputation for marking the end of winter comes from their tendency to flock up in the spring and switch from their diet of fruits and berries from trees and shrubs in the winter to that of worms on the ground in the spring. Robins simply become more visible as the snow disappears and the ground softens.
Finally, though the California condor was certainly the poster bird of the campaign against DDT following Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the American robin played a crucial role in developing the case against DDT. In the spring of 1963, the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, decided to spray its elm trees with DDT to kill bark beetles. Charles Wurster, a young PhD organic chemist at Dartmouth, decided to check on the effects of DDT on other non-insect species. He and his colleagues conducted bird counts and found no fatalities among birds in the days following spraying. Within weeks, however, Wurster collected and dissected 151 bird carcasses, mostly robins. They found that DDT had caused major neurological damage resulting in seizures and death among the birds. Wurster went on to join other scientists to establish the Environmental Defense Fund with the explicit goal of eliminating the use of DDT. A DDT-induced decline in robin populations continued until 1967 when the vestiges of DDT began to disappear from earthworms and from the soil. The rest is history - a history that unfortunately remains an on-going concern.