3 American Robins

This gallery contains 3 photos. The boldest of the thrushes of the Pacific Northwest, one of the most recognizable birds in North America, and one of the heralds of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, the American Robin is a familiar sight just about anywhere where there’s a patch of green — lawns, forests, mountains, and even golf courses. While it has been stereotyped as the early bird who gets the early worm, these large, long-lived songbirds are also insectivores who have a propensity to (shamelessly) plunder blueberries from right under one’s nose, in addition to mountain ash and pyracantha, swallowing these berries in a single gulp.

an adult male Robin roosts in a tree at the Reifel Sanctuary on December 29, 2015
f/6.3, 1/1000, 500mm, ISO 320

Both adult males and females will visit my backyard throughout most of the year, but especially (and not coincidentally) when the blueberries ripen in early June and the pyracantha berries ripen in early winter (last year in early fall, thanks to an early ripening of the fruit, 8 Robin “regulars” cleared the front lawn pyracantha bush of its hundreds of berries in three short weeks). I have never seen any robins’ nests built near the house, nor nestlings, but at the start of summer this year, I saw fledglings (for the first time) accompanying the parents.

an adult female wolfs down berries from the front lawn pyracantha bush on December 14, 2015
f/6.3, 1/125, 500mm, ISO 800

Ironically, I chanced upon two such youngsters/sub adults when hoping to photograph a Rufous Hummingbird feeding from the fuchsia. Two juvenile Robins, with typically much more muted colors than their parents, were in the clearing by the euonymous bushes, and neither was particularly inclined to move just because I had unwittingly intruded on their space. Instead, they took turns being in the limelight, and the youngster you see here (no more than a couple of feet away from my lens) was the one to like the attention more than the other. Learn more about the American Robin by visiting its Cornell Lab of Ornithology allaboutbirds.org profile here.

one of two visiting fledglings in the backyard, photographed on June 23, 2016
f/14, 1/200, 289mm, ISO 1000

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