Now playing .. robin’s song
This time of year, with the snowbanks from each mini-blizzard shrinking a little faster each time, we're so used to seeing and hearing our overwintering birds -chickadees, juncos, jays, woodpeckers - that anything new immediately catches eye and ear. That happened to me last week when, among the little slate-grey and white juncos feeding on our deck, there appeared a little, brown-striped fox sparrow. Around the same time, off at a distance, I heard the first lilting music of a song sparrow. A couple of days later, I saw a flash of scarlet … a passing cardinal.
Still, they all seemed a little early. So I deemed their arrival a fluke. Especially when, a week later, no more showed up. After all, we'd been having almost weekly snowfalls, with another in the forecast. And sharp frosts in between.
Imagine my surprise when, on April 2, I glanced out the window and saw the unmistakable sprint-and-pause, peck-peck-peck, sprint-and-pause, of a dark grey bird twice their size - wearing a red vest. Not singing yet, mind you - that would come later - but definitely Robin Redbreast, trusted harbinger of Spring.
MIGRATE HERE
Migrating in stages from Mexico and the Gulf Coast, groups of males arrive here to select and announce nesting territories in time for the later females. Back in late April 1995, as I recovered outdoors from prostate surgery, one of them chose for his soapbox our lofty elm. Which put him directly over my recuperative rocking chair.
From there, for the next few weeks, he unwound his quicksilver falderals. All similar, yet no two exactly alike. Or, as American baseball legend Yogi Berra would say, “All the same but different.” Perhaps, like Yogi, who likely suffered baseball concussions, his brain was addled from attacking his reflection in window panes? More than once that spring, I witnessed that. Glimpsing themselves, males repeatedly charged the supposed intruder especially if their mate were nesting close by. One of them kept pecking and fluttering nonstop for a good 15 minutes.
RECALL SONGS
To help my own concussed brain, that winter I'd lost a tooth-filling from tumbling backwards on hard ice, I recall these songs, I'd translate the phrases into English: “Cheerily, cheerily, cheer, cheer--cheer!” came close. (Years later, reading Canadian novelist Kyo Maclear's lovely 2017 Birds Art Life memoir, I was delighted to see she'd used almost the same wording.) But my robin went further. From my journal:
Sometimes he does a final riff that sounds like “Read it?” (Or perhaps “Eat it?”) There's also a querulous end-note that sounds like “See?” Or “Unique!” And sometimes he changes the order. Meanwhile faraway robins, almost out of earshot, answer with variations of their own: “Hear me? Hear?”
Which reminds me of how a Prussian-born UNB classmate of mine, hearing our robin for the first time, judged its song inferior to that of the true ‘Old World’ robin. The word he used was “undisciplined.” Sounds condescending, but Kris had a point. My own first experience of that little singer was in London, England in 1987. Its song, coming after days of fog and drizzle, was indeed lovely - disciplined, yes; but lovely.
Actually, friend Kris, our “robin “is a thrush, a member of an entirely different tribe. And had you heard the heart-melting threnody of our hermit thrush in dusky woods at sunset or dawn, as I have many a time, I'm sure you'd have become a convert. And to hear it at midnight in a wilderness tent, as I have, is bliss indeed. Still, for sheer avian exuberance, our meadow-dwelling thrush takes the cake.