The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The prevalence of CT’s state bird, the robin
Our state bird — adaptable, amenable to sharing the landscape with humans, getting plump year-round on whatever invasive species is available — is out, hopping and a’ bopping and a’ singing its song.
“It’s been a robin convention up here,’’ said Cathy Hagadorn, executive director of Deer Pond Farm in Sherman, the nature center owned by the Connecticut Audubon Society. “They all read the memo. They’re not social distancing. They’re all over our front lawn.’’
“It’s one of the harbingers of spring,’’ said Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society.
“With the ground thawing, we’re seeing them here,’’ said Bethany Sheffer, volunteer coordinator and naturalist at the Sharon Audubon Center, owned by Audubon Connecticut. “They’re singing. The red-winged blackbirds are singing. It’s spring.’’
The American robin. Turdus migratorius, is a thrush.
It gets its common name because homesick, seasick European settlers, coming to the New World, saw welcoming natives — brown-backed, orange-breasted birds — and called them robins, after the much-smaller, but still brown-and-orange European robin.
The General Assembly voted in 1943 to name the robin the state bird. Michigan was ahead of us, naming the robin its state bird in 1931. Wisconsin came after, naming the robin its state bird in 1949. (Those red show-offs, the cardinals, top the list at seven states.)
They’ve long been considered the Nutmegger equivalent of the swallows of Capistrano — when the robins come back singing ‘chirrup, chirrup,’ winter is over.
But it’s complicated. There are robins in the northeast year-round.
“I realized that about 30 years ago,’’ said Margaret Robbins, the aptlynamed owner of the Wild Bird Unlimited store in Brookfield. “I was driving up to the Adirondacks, in winter and there were hundreds of robins, gleaning the corn in a cornfield there.’’
Robbins has even had robins at her feeders in the winter, gobbling up mealworms.
“You can teach them to come to feeders,’’ she said.
In fact, there are robins everywhere. With the exception of Florida and parts of the Southwest, there are robins living and breeding across the continental U.S. At last count, there were 310 million of them hopping around.
Ken Elkins, community conservation manager for Audubon Connecticut, said he sees robins in the woods at the Audubon Connecticut’s Bent of the River sanctuary in Southbury.
“I’m starting to see them now in small groups on the lawn,’’ Elkins said.
But the robins we glimpse in winter may not be the same we watch in summer.
Robins are short-distance migrators. Connecticut’s robins head south to the mid-Atlantic states when it turns cold. In turn, robins from northeast Quebec and northern New England shift here for our somewhat milder winters.
Elkins said if you look at them carefully, you can see the difference.
“They’re a little bigger and they’re definitely darker,’’ he said of our Canadian russet-breasted snowbirds.
Robins are adaptable when it comes to food and who they eat it with. In the winter, they roost together, eating berries and other fruit they can find. In the summer, they’re territorial, guarding their space while eyeing the ground for worms, caterpillars and grubs.
“Think of it this way,’’ said Hagadorn, of Deer Pond Farm. “In the summer they’re proteineaters. In the winter, they’re vegetarians.’’
They also profited from humans.
Before the Europeans came, the
North American earth was largely wormless — glaciers had killed them off, But Old World settlers brought Old-Worm worms with their plantings. The worms multiplied, and robins had a new source of food.
Now, non-native invasive species like honeysuckle and Oriental bittersweet are covering the landscape. But invasive vines have lots of berries, giving the robins food in winter. Then and now, the robins profit.
They also use corners and ledges of home to build their nests. Each year, they can lay as many as three clutches of blue eggs. People are advised to leave them alone and watch the babies grow to be fledglings.
Because they’re so common, we
can easily overlook robins. But imagine seeing this big, alert, orange-breasted bird for the first time.
“They’re beautiful,’’ said Comins, of the Connecticut Audubon Society.
In Connecticut, there’s probably no other bird that people can see so easily everywhere — at the shoreline, in city parks, in the woods, on suburban lawns. That may let us disregard them. But it also shows how well robins adapt to their surroundings.
“We call them harbingers of spring,’’ Hagadorn said. “Maybe we should call them harbingers of habitat.’’