I don’t remember a year when we’ve received so many reports of
American robins being seen in January and now into February.
Hardly a day has passed by without someone telling of seeing a
robin in their yard and, – "What should we feed it?"
Another frequent question has been, "Could this mean an
early spring?"
During nearly all winters since I began doing Christmas bird
counts (CBC) in Wisconsin, starting in 1958, at least one robin
was seen during the count day. It was during one of our northern
Door County CBC’s, I think in 1964, that Harold Wilson and I
counted over 60 robins in the village of Ephraim alone. They
were all over the place, feasting on wild fruits such as purple
nightshade and wild grapes.
Another high count for us occurred on December 15, 1990 when
20 robins were observed. Then came Dec. 19, 1998 when our group
of four or five counters saw 224 along Cove Road north of the
Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal. The tangles of wild fruits, along with
domesticated fruiting shrubs and trees there, provide wintering
birds with a haven for good food.
Species of trees and shrubs whose fruits are known to be
favored by robins include hawthorns, burning bush (Euonymus), any
of the dogwood shrubs, viburnums, sumac, mountain ash, wild
grape, highbush cranberry and even frozen apples.
In answer to those who ask what kinds of offerings they can
put out to help the wintering robins, some of the foods that have
proven to be tempting to these large strong members of the thrush
family include: suet mixtures, bits of broken-up suet,
hard-cooked egg yolk, peanut hearts, peanut butter, currants,
raisins, cottage cheese, pecan or walnut meats, cooked spaghetti,
American cheese, cornbread, doughnuts, white bread and various
fruits such as chopped cherries, bits of apples, pears and
strawberries.
There is another food that the robins surely would devour,
once they become conditioned to their availability, and that’s
mealworms. As for a source of these bird-relished treats, you
might try a pet store, or explore the inter-net via one of the
search engines such as "Google." It is also possible
to raise your own. I do know that once eastern bluebirds
discover one’s mealworm handouts (on a small elevated tray, for
example) during the nesting season, they’ll be hooked and come
repeatedly for this delicacy.
The famous Koenigs, Edna and Henry, of Sauk City, Wisconsin,
became quite famous for their very successful bird rehabilitation
work in past years. Two of the foods that they purchased by the
thousands every year and fed to their bird patients were
dehydrated crickets and live mealworms. By the way, mealworms
are simply the larval stage of a common beetle, Tenebrio
molitor.
I’ll always remember a trip we took to Florida in the
mid-1970’s and the hundreds of robins we observed feasting on the
small red fruits of the highly invasive Brazilian pepper trees,
actually appearing more like tall shrubs than trees. In no way
am I suggesting that you plant these aggressive shrubs here
(which very likely wouldn’t grow at this latitude anyway!) but
there are a good many excellent choices of robin favorites you
can plant on your property.
Consider red cedar, greenbrier (a vine), mulberry, Juneberry
or serviceberry, blackberry and raspberry, wild cherry, sumac,
woodbine or Virginia creeper (a vine), wild grape, dogwood and
blueberry. It has been pretty well proven that birds such as
robins and waxwings, which are known to inflict considerable
damage to commercial or private orchard and garden crops, greatly
prefer wild fruits over, for example, Montmorency tart cherries,
currants or raspberries.
Many people consider the robin to be our harbinger of spring.
What they may not realize is that these so-called harbingers of
spring may have been in the region throughout this past winter.
It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.
The bird we like to think is a far better candidate for the
genuine harbinger of spring, at least in northeastern Wisconsin,
is the horned lark. We saw our first one this morning, Feb. 2,
on our way home from church. This is a little earlier than our
first usual spring sighting of these strong fliers that so often
frequent the shoulders of roads where they usually can find
plenty of the large nutritious seeds of last year’s ragweed
plants and other weedy species.
I agree that the first week of February is ordinarily not the
time to start thinking "spring," but the very sight of
a robin or a horned lark is nearly enough to trigger such
pleasant thoughts!
Some of our "harbingers of spring," the robins,
are with us in the middle of winter.
This column appeared in the Door County Advocate
on 02/07/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.
