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CONTENTS

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Britain’s Favourite Bird
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Copyright
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Epub ISBN: 9781473546103
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Text copyright © Stephen Moss 2017

Cover images © Mary Evans Picture Library

Stephen Moss has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Square Peg in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

To Sally Rose, my aunt, and June Dolan, my mother-in-law, who love their garden robins

I have heard of a closet naturalist who, slighting the labours of a brother in the field, alleged that he could pen a volume on the robin; but surely, if confined to the subject and without the aid of fable, it would prove a duller book than Robinson Crusoe.

William MacGillivray

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Art thou the bird whom Man loves best,

The pious bird with the scarlet breast,

Our little English Robin…

William Wordsworth, ‘The Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly’, 1806

Robin on a leafless bough,

Lord in Heaven, how he sings!

Now cold winter’s cruel wind

Makes playmates of withered things…

W.H. Davies, ‘Robin Redbreast’, 1908

There is a little bird rather celebrated for its affection to mankind than its singing, which, however, in our climate has the sweetest note of all others… The note of other birds is louder, and their inflexions more capricious, but this bird’s voice is soft, tender and well supported, and the more to be valued as we enjoy it the greatest part of the winter.

Oliver Goldsmith, from A History of the Earth: and Animated Nature, 1774

It is the first mild day of March:

Each minute sweeter than before.

The redbreast sings from the tall larch

That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,

Which seems a sense of joy to yield

To the bare trees, and mountains bare,

And grass in the green field.

William Wordsworth, ‘To My Sister’, 1798

The nest is hid close at its mossy root

Composed of moss and grass and lined with hair

And five brun-coloured eggs snug sheltered there

And bye and bye a happy brood will be

The tennants of this woodland privacy.

John Clare, ‘The Robin’s Nest’, 1835

No bird is earlier awake than the redbreast; it begins the music of the woods, welcomes the dawn of day. It also protracts its warble to the latest hour, and is seen fluttering about in the evening.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux, 1771–1786

What little birds, with frequent shrillest chirp

When honeysuckle flowers succeed the rose,

The inmost thicket haunt? Their tawny breasts,

Spotted with black, bespeak the youngling thrush,

Though less in size; it is the redbreast’s brood,

New-flown, helpless, with still the downy tufts

Upon their heads.

James Grahame, The Birds of Scotland, 1806

Stay, little foolish, flutt’ring thing,

Whither, ah! Whither would you wing

Your airy flight? Stay here and sing,

The mistress to delight.

No, no sweet Robin, you shall not go;

Where, you wanton, could you be

Half so happy as with me?

‘Sweet Robin’, Anonymous, 1828

The robin redbreast and the wren

Are God Almighty’s cock and hen;

The martin and the swallow

Are God Almighty’s birds to hallow.

Nineteenth-century folk rhyme

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too –

While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats, from ‘To Autumn’, written 19 September 1819

Sweet little bird in russet coat

The livery of the closing year

I love thy lonely plaintive note

& tiney whispering song to hear

While on the stile or garden seat

I sit to watch the falling leaves

The songs thy little joys repeat

My lonliness relieves

& many are the lonely minds

That hear & welcome thee anew

John Clare, ‘The Autumn Robin’, 1835

And when the short days

Begin to be cold

Robin redbreast will come home to thee

And be very bold.

Robert Crowley, ‘Of Flatterers’, 1550

The North Wind doth blow

And we shall have Snow

And what will poor Robin do then, poor thing?

Anonymous, sixteenth century

BRITAIN’S FAVOURITE BIRD

As I write these words, a little bird comes to the open door of my back-garden office. Hopping towards me, he cocks his head to one side as if checking me out. Then he flies up into a nearby elder and, moments later, begins to pour out his delicate, tuneful song, full of nuance and pathos. On this late-autumn afternoon, when all is quiet in the natural world, this sight and sound fills me with an unexpected rush of joy and delight.

The bird is, of course, a robin – how could it be anything else? No other bird is quite so confident or approachable; and no other species sings so regularly at this time of year, as the nights are rapidly drawing in, and we prepare for the winter season to come.

From deep in our childhood memories, we recall the robin’s image on a million Christmas cards: the pert, plump, red-breasted bird that is as much a part of the festive season as mince pies or presents piled up beneath the tree. Now, and indeed throughout the winter, the robin is a constant presence outside our kitchen window, inclining its head to one side as if nagging us to restock the bird table, to make sure it gets enough to eat.

Whatever the time of year, we welcome robins into our lives. Robins are one of the first birds to begin singing each year – in my Somerset garden they often start as early as New Year’s Day. Spring may still be several months away, but those brief, measured phrases, methodically laid down upon the winter air like musical notes along a stave, herald the season to come.

By March or April, the robins in my garden have staked out their territories. At this time of year, whenever I leave the house, I can hear three or four birds, each delivering their song almost continuously from dawn to dusk. I know that they do so for purely biological reasons – to repel rival males and to attract a mate – but I defy anyone to hear a singing robin and not carry on with a spring in their step. Sometimes biology must give way to emotion.

Soon afterwards, each pair gets down to the serious business of raising a family: building a nest, laying a clutch of eggs and, when these hatch, flying to and fro to find food for their brood of hungry chicks. If they manage to fledge their offspring – and with their exposed, open nest robins often fall victim to predatory magpies or jays – then sometime in June I shall have a new visitor outside my office door. A juvenile robin: a speckled, brownish creature, whose plump body and black, beady eyes are the only clues to its parentage.

Around this time the adults stop singing for a few weeks, hiding away deep inside the hawthorn bushes and cider-apple trees to moult their worn plumage into a set of spanking new feathers. Then, towards the end of the summer holidays, they start to sing again – having, uniquely amongst British birds, established an autumn and winter territory. And so, as the year ends, my robin continues to serenade me as I go about my daily chores.

I say my robin, but the chances are this is not the bird I heard singing back on New Year’s Day. Robins rarely live longer than a year or two, and so this songster is quite likely to be the son of that original bird, or perhaps an interloper from another garden nearby.

My aunt, who has fed robins in the same Sussex garden for almost sixty years, dismisses this notion as ‘stuff and nonsense’. She claims that the same bird has been coming to her window ledge for at least ten years, and no amount of urging on my part will convince her otherwise. Nor am I allowed to mention that other inconvenient truth about robins: that of all our garden birds, they are the most aggressive and violent, sometimes fighting rival males to the death. Like other devotees of the robin, she hears this, but resolutely chooses to ignore it.

Alongside the real, biological robin, there’s also a cultural and historical ‘robin’. This other aspect of the robin is expressed through poetry and prose, and in our hearts, as we admire, love and celebrate the wonder of this little bird.

Robins are embedded in our literary culture – arguably even more so than those other classic avian icons, the skylark and the nightingale. In Andrew Lack’s delightful book Redbreast (published in 2008, as an updating of his father David’s 1950 volume Robin Redbreast), the index lists the various authors who have included the robin in their poetry or prose.

This includes those you would expect – Chaucer and Shakespeare – together with novelists Anne and Emily (but not Charlotte) Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Other writers who have included robins in their prose or poetry include Robert Herrick and Robert Burns, William Blake and William Wordsworth, a quartet of Johns – Clare, Keats, Bunyan and Betjeman – Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes, Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, and children’s authors Frances Hodgson Burnett and Enid Blyton.

Yet even though the robin is a popular subject for poets, as Richard Mabey points out in his introduction to Redbreast, it rarely reaches the literary heights of other species: ‘There are no truly great robin poems, like Ted Hughes’s “Swifts” or George Meredith’s “The Lark Ascending”; the robin simply isn’t that kind of heroic, elusive creature.’

We love the robin for its no-nonsense familiarity, its ordinariness, and its approachability. Gardeners have long regarded the robin as a friendly companion, perching on a garden spade, and waiting expectantly for the soil to be overturned so it can grab a juicy earthworm.

Its neighbourliness allows us to at least begin to imagine what life must be like for this little bird; for it haunts exactly the same sphere as us. It remains mostly on or near the ground, not rising high into the heavens like a skylark; and also spends the whole year with us, not gallivanting off to some distant, unknown continent, like the swift.

The cultural aspect of robins is not always entirely positive: they may bring darkness as well as light. If one dares to venture across the threshold and into our home, or flies in through an open window, there is a longstanding superstition that someone in that household is doomed to die. Yet even as bad omens, we make them part of our myths and stories.

Robins have long been regarded as religious symbols: according to Christian mythology, the red breast is supposed to symbolise the blood of Christ, the feathers having been stained as the bird pulled out spurs from his crown of thorns. And no account of the cultural importance of robins could fail to recognise their central place in the festive season. But the reason robins are so ubiquitous on Christmas cards may come as a surprise, as we shall discover in Chapter 12.

The cultural, literary and historical robin is, of course, an entirely human invention, but no less real for that. Indeed, if this aspect of the robin didn’t exist – if it were just another anonymous species of chat, like most of the other 300 members of the avian family it belongs to – then it would hardly merit the attention it gets. For no other species has quite so great a hold on our national psyche.

So I wasn’t at all surprised when in May 2015 the robin topped the poll for Britain’s Favourite Bird. The only real question was by how big a margin it would win. In the event, the robin triumphed by a huge distance: of almost a quarter of a million votes cast on the shortlist of ten species it attracted more than a third. The nearest challengers, the barn owl and the blackbird, scored barely a third of the robin’s total.

This wasn’t the first time the robin had hit the headlines. Back in 1960, The Times newspaper had carried out its own (albeit self-selected) poll amongst its readers, in which the robin comfortably beat the red grouse to be crowned Britain’s (unofficial) national bird.

The man behind the 2015 poll, David Lindo – aka The Urban Birder – had in the final days of the vote actually lobbied against the robin, coming out openly for his own favourite, the blackbird. But after the result, he hailed the robin’s victory with good grace, cleverly linking the bird’s less-than-wholesome qualities with aspects of the British national character: ‘Despite being a seemingly friendly bird, the robin is hugely territorial and very defensive of its territory. I presume that reflects us as an island nation – that we will stand our ground.’

Maybe he’s right – we love the robin because it reminds us of ourselves, with all our faults as well as our virtues. We simply choose to sweep the robin’s less savoury qualities under the carpet, and focus instead on its friendly character, its neighbourliness, and its conviviality – all qualities we would like to have. How else can we explain why the robin is so popular?

This may, of course, simply be down to its ubiquity: with more than six million breeding pairs, the robin is second only to the wren as Britain’s commonest bird. But it is more likely to be the way the robin lives its whole life alongside us, ever-present during every month and season of the year. Certainly no other British bird is quite so familiar. Wherever I travel in Britain – apart from a few remote offshore islands – I come across robins. In the heart of the city and in the open countryside, while waiting for a train or sitting in my garden, in winter and summer, and by day or by night, I have seen or heard robins: either hopping about in front of me or singing that plaintive, delicate song.

And yet… how much do we really know about the robin? Where else in the world can they be found? Why are male robins so violent? And, given that until the mid-twentieth century its official name was ‘Redbreast’, how on earth did the robin get its name? They are just some of the questions I hope to answer in this book…

JANUARY

New Year’s Day has dawned cold and clear in deepest Somerset, with a thin layer of hoar frost on every twig and branch, and a pleasing crispness underfoot. The mercury remains well below zero, and yet, even before the sun has risen, a small, plump bird is already up and about. Fluffing out his feathers to keep as warm as possible, he turns to reveal an unexpected splash of colour in this otherwise monochrome landscape.

With short, jerky movements, the bird makes his way across the icing-sugared lawn, then hops up onto a low bush and delivers a brief burst of song. Puffs of smoky breath emerge from his half-opened bill, as the notes pierce the chill, silent air. We humans love to hear this sound, but that’s not the reason this bird is singing. For this is a male robin, and he’s defending his winter territory.

Like all birds – indeed, like every other living thing, including us – this robin is only here because his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on for countless generations back in time, managed to successfully reproduce.

Now it’s his turn to begin that process all over again. The year has only just begun, and spring is still very far away, but this primal impulse is already driving this robin. All his instincts, honed over the 50 million years since songbirds first appeared on Earth, compel him to get the breeding cycle underway. He now needs to choose a territory, defend it against rivals, find and court a mate, fertilise her eggs, build a nest, and feed their chicks until they too are independent, some six or seven months hence.

Think of this robin as a small, colourful ball of feathers with just one aim in life: to breed. If he succeeds, he will pass on his unique genetic heritage to the next and future generations. If he fails, then his chance is gone forever. It’s a heavy responsibility; one belied by that sweet, tuneful, delicate song.

Yet, soon after the end of the breeding season, this robin may well be dead. Robins – like most small birds – live their life on a very different timescale to us. They rarely survive for more than two years, and any individual robin has a greater than even chance of dying before it reaches its first birthday. But if he can successfully raise a family, he will have done his duty, and given himself a glimpse of immortality.

At present, though, there is little time for song. On a freezing January day, with only a few short hours of daylight, his first priority must be to find food. Cold weather doesn’t kill birds – at least not directly – but the frost and ice that come with it do, by covering up their food, and making it harder to find.

Like most small birds, robins must find and eat between one quarter and one third of their body weight in food – every single day. Fail to do so, and they will die. So the robin stops singing, drops to the ground, and hops across the frosted lawn in search of something to eat.

What exactly is a robin? For a simple description, it is hard to beat that written by the greatest of all robin scientists, David Lack, whose 1943 book The Life of the Robin remains one of the all-time classics of natural history writing:

The English [sic] robin is a bird rather smaller than a sparrow, in build between a thrush and a warbler, uniform brown on the upperparts, with an orange-red breast and a white abdomen. It is widely distributed through the woodlands of Europe, and in Britain is also a familiar garden bird.

In a more recent work, Robins and Chats, the modern-day ornithologist Peter Clement neatly sums up our overall image of this familiar bird:

A small- to medium-sized, fairly plump chat, with round head, slender tail, red throat and breast, and distinctive melodious song, given year-round. Common or locally common, and widely known as a familiar garden or suburban bird… often celebrated as a symbol of winter on Christmas cards.

A typical robin is about 14 cm (5½ inches) long, with a wingspan of 21 cm (8¼ inches). Like all flying birds, which have evolved special adaptations so they can get airborne, it is much lighter than you might expect: on average an adult robin weighs just 18 grams (less than two thirds of an ounce), a shade over the weight of a couple of new pound coins.

Both male and female robins have that same characteristic and familiar silhouette: plump and perky, with a short tail and upright stance. The two sexes are, to all intents and purposes, identical in appearance: mid-brown above, and white on the lower belly, with a narrow blue-grey band running from the forehead, above the eye, to the sides of the neck. But the most obvious feature of all adult robins is, of course, the red breast, which extends up the bird’s face to encompass its sharp bill and beady, black eyes.

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Young robins, which usually appear in our gardens from late spring onwards, are similar in size, shape and behaviour to their parents, but lack the distinctive colourful breast. Instead, their plumage is brown, mottled and speckled with lighter markings above and below. They will not acquire the adult plumage – with those famous orange-red underparts – until the autumn.

We like to think of robins as a distinctively British bird, and yet the species is common and widespread throughout virtually the whole of Europe, from Gibraltar in the south to way beyond the Arctic Circle in the north, as well as being found in parts of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Elsewhere in its range, however, the robin is predominantly a shy, woodland bird: as the doyen of twentieth-century ornithologists Max Nicholson pointed out, on the continent robins are rarely found in the kind of open, artificial habitats where we are used to seeing them. Indeed, in a reversal of what we would expect, in the rest of Europe their place alongside human beings in towns and gardens is usually filled by birds we would consider rare and elusive: the redstart, black redstart and nightingale.

Their migratory habits may be different, too. Unlike our mostly sedentary birds, robins in northern and eastern Europe do leave their breeding grounds in autumn, heading south and west to milder climes where food is more reliable – including our own shores, as we shall discover in Chapter 10.

Like most of our familiar garden birds, the robin is also a member of the largest of all the world’s bird orders: the Passeriformes. This includes almost half the world’s species, well over 5,000 in all, of which roughly 4,000 are classified as songbirds.

There are almost a hundred different families of songbirds, from tits to thrushes and larks to buntings, which in turn are split into hundreds of genera. Once thought of as a member of the thrush family, the robin has now been reclassified as one of the Old World Flycatchers. This includes the redstarts, nightingales, wheatears and chats, as well as pied and spotted flycatchers.

The robin may be in a very large family (amongst songbirds, only the New World family of tanagers and their allies contains more species), but it is now the only species in its particular genus, Erithacus. That’s because scientists have recently discovered that the Japanese and Ryukyu robins are not quite so closely related to our own European robin as we once thought.

And yet if you look through any list of the world’s birds, you’ll find at least a hundred different ‘robins’, along with many more species with ‘robin’ as part of their name, such as robin-chats, bush robins and scrub robins. These birds mostly have two things in common: they feed on insects, usually dropping from low perches onto the ground to do so; and many have a noticeable red (or occasionally pink or yellow) breast.