The not so cuddly truth about our favourite Christmas cutie

ON a cold, grey, winter’s afternoon, few sights lift my spirits quite as much as a robin, hopping across my lawn and showing off its lovely red breast.

Occasionally, it’ll fly up to a post and deliver its delightful song, cheering me even more. But when snow and ice covers the ground, the robin will be the first to come to our back door in search of a handout.

Indeed, robins look to us for sustenance during cold spells, as their natural food of worms and other invertebrates can be hard to find.

As any gardener will tell you, robins have struck up an extraordinary relationship with humans and will boldly perch on a bucket edge or fork handle to pick up worms that have been unearthed. But most of us actually know very little about these busy, hardy little birds that are fearsome fighters with glorious voices and which, all too often, have a sadly short lifespan.

The love of robins and habit of feeding them in our gardens goes back a very long way according to legend.

Back in the 6th century, Saint Serf of Fife (most famous for slaying a dragon terrorising people near Loch Lomond in Scotland), was apparently the first person to start feeding them. His friends were so jealous they killed the bird, but fortunately it was brought back to life.

Stories about feeding robins are common because they are legendary for their tameness, and one of the few wild birds that will take food from the hand. In the 1920s, Britain’s then foreign secretary Edward Grey taught a robin to do this and wrote about it in a bestseller, The Charm Of Birds.

Recently, naturalist Hugh Warwick hand-tamed a robin in a few days. After a while, the bird would even come inside his home to beg for food, making him wonder who was in charge in their relationship.

Bird watchers love the robin – some years ago it was voted the most popular bird in Ireland in an RTÉ Radio poll.

I have been fascinated by robins since childhood, which is why I have written a book about these remarkable birds.

I can still recall the first time I found a robin’s nest, hidden away in the depths of a honeysuckle in my mother’s garden.

Now I live in Somerset, I see them everywhere: in reedbeds, along the coast, in the main street and, of course, in my own garden.

As I write these words, in my garden office, a robin is looking back at me with its head cocked to one side. It is this confidence and boldness, and willingness to interact with people when needs must and times are harsh outside, that led to this cute little bird to being so closely associated with the festive season.

ANOTHER reason we connect robins with Christmas is that the early postmen wore red uniforms, and so were nicknamed ‘robins’. And, as the cards pop through your letter box over the coming days, note how many feature a robin! There are more than 300 different species in the family of birds known as old-world flycatchers and chats, including the redstart and the nightingale.

Like its cousin, the nightingale, robins often sing at night – especially in cities, where permanently lit street-lamps fool them into thinking the sun is about to rise.

Once one begins, others follow, until the streets echo with a relay of robin songs, each harmonising with its neighbour, as they defend their territories which – at just over half a hectare – are a bit smaller than an average-sized football pitch. When people hear a bird singing at night they tend to assume it must be a nightingale. Yet nightingales are never found in the middle of cities.

During Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, it is said she breezed into a meeting one autumn day and announced that, the night before, a nightingale had serenaded her from just outside her bedroom window at No.10.

A bold civil servant pointed out that nightingales are summer visitors, and all would have left for Africa – adding that it would have a robin. The prime minister then hissed in his ear: ‘If the Prime Minister says she heard a nightingale, she heard a nightingale!’

The ‘nightingale’ that sang in London’s Berkeley Square, in the classic wartime ballad, would have been a robin.

And most likely, it would have been a female, as the robin is the only songbird in Ireland and Britain whose females regularly command territories and sing throughout the winter. That delicate, plaintive song is yet another reason we love robins so much – along with the fact they look so sweet. Partly this is down to those big, black, beady eyes. These large eyes serve a purpose. Because robins mostly live in woods, their eyes have evolved to be bigger, so they could see more to start feeding earlier in the morning, and stop later in the evening.

That may be why robins are often the first bird in the dawn chorus to start to sing, long before it gets light.

Despite their appearance, robins can also be very aggressive – males will fight and even kill their rivals. Crucially, its red breast acts as a red flag. Researchers using a patch of red cloth have shown how it stirs other birds to fury.

This makes good evolutionary sense: although the longest recorded-lived robin survived to the age of 11, most die before they reach two. So they have to make sure they can defend a territory, find a female and raise a family, before it’s too late.

Poet Robert Graves said that in folklore the robin was known to ‘murder his father’, which is said to explain why it has a red breast.

In my garden, robins usually nest in the thick hedgerow along the side, or sometimes in our greenhouse, among a grapevine’s tangled branches.

They have to hide their nest very carefully, as their eggs and chicks are very vulnerable to predators such as sparrowhawks and cats.

If the nest does get raided, though, they will usually try for a second brood.

Robins are well known for nesting in some truly bizarre places.

As well as garden sheds and outside toilets (often building on top of the cistern), nests have been found in letter boxes, inside a human skull, and even in the engine of a World War II plane.

One man was astonished to find that a robin had started to make a nest in his unmade bed. In Basingstoke in the south of England, a gardener hung up his coat in the tool shed at 9.15am, and returned to go for lunch at 1pm – by which time a robin had already started to nest in one of his pockets.

Given how common they are, it’s hardly surprising that robins are so central to literary culture, rivalled only by the skylark and nightingale.

Authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare, William Blake to Enid Blyton, and Thomas Hardy to Ted Hughes, have written about robins, while they also feature in a well-known (and rather grisly) children’s tale and nursery rhyme: Babes In The Wood and Who Killed Cock Robin?

Four professional football clubs in England – Bristol City, Charlton Athletic, Cheltenham and Swindon Town – are nicknamed ‘The Robins’ and all play in red kits.

This side of the Irish Sea, Redbreast is a popular tipple for whiskey aficionados.

Michael Jackson’s hit Rockin’ Robin and the 1926 song When The Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along) were written about the much larger US version – actually a kind of thrush, more closely related to our blackbird.

The colour known as ‘robin egg blue’ is also based on the egg of the American robin – our robin’s eggs are creamy coloured with reddish blotches.

But be they Irish, American or Australian, what these perky birds have in common is that they all have a red – or, more accurately, orange breast.

FOR much of history, the robin was known as a ruddock – an AngloSaxon word meaning ‘red bird’. Then, from the late Middle Ages onwards, it was called the ‘redbreast’. The Irish for robin is spideog, which also means a ‘tiny child’, ‘a dainty woman’ or ‘drop from the nose’.

Familiar creatures attract nicknames: my grandmother referred to her favourite garden birds as ‘Jenny wren’, ‘Tom tit’ and, of course, ‘Robin redbreast’.

The first two have more or less fallen out of use, but ‘robin’ persisted. And is now the bird’s official name.

One final puzzle: given that the robin’s breast is a distinct shade of orange, rather than red, why do we call it ‘redbreast’ in the first place? The answer is simple: until oranges started to be imported from Spain in Tudor times, the English had no word for the colour ‘orange’.

Hence this bird will forever be known as ‘Robin redbreast’!

O THE Robin: A Biography, by Stephen Moss (Square Peg, €12.49.