May 1 2017. Burlington ON. It’s the First of May and pouring rain, actually cold and pouring rain; and has been all day. It’s a date with significance around the world, it’s International Workers Day and many European cultures celebrate May’s arrival and association with spring. For me it’s a blockbuster month for birding, but today rain; this might be the wettest spring ever.
I look out onto our flooded urban back yard where a crouching Cottontail Rabbit, its fur matted and damp, looks balefully at the rising waters. Closer to the house a pair of American Robins have a nest, I’ve been watching the female sitting tight over her clutch of eggs for the past couple of weeks and marveled at avian instinct. The way she and her mate built the nest just like every other robin has for centuries, a skillfully woven if slightly ragged cup with a lining of mud. How the chicks when they hatch will prompt the parents’ dawn to dusk non-stop delivery of food (Academics seem to prefer to call feeding by another name, provisioning; it sorts out the birders from the ornithologists I suppose.) The first chicks have hatched in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve seen the male bring small fragments of food to the nest. Today’s often-torrential rains present another challenge, how to keep the eggs and chicks warm and dry. I don’t imagine for one moment that the female received any instruction from her mother in how to keep the kids dry, yet she knows exactly and instinctively what to do. In the photos below you can see how she has mantled the nest with her outstretched wings.
As I took these photos the male turned up with a couple of morsels, as soon as he delivered it and left she was back. My marveling at all of this innate breeding cycle know-how: nest-building, incubation, feeding and safeguarding (not exclusive to American Robins of course) just underscored how much we don’t know or understand about life. It also made American Robins my Birds of the Day.
