_Robins._
Now I have tested your staying qualities, giving you the worst first,
and we have come to the bright side of what the birds have taught me.
After all, I have a lot to thank the cannibal birds for, as there are
about thirty acres in this piece of second-growth woods where I am now
sitting, and during the summer months I take a stroll down here at least
once a week. This is the most perfect place for robins to build that one
could find in a day’s travel, yet the last four or five years I haven’t
seen five of their nests down here; but just one-half mile away, at my
home, there were seventeen nests last summer, all within one hundred
yards of the house, and outside of the thirteen maples that shade our
door-yard the shrubbery is very young. All thinking humanity must admit
that they come there for protection from their natural enemies, as there
is usually a crow’s nest hidden away in this or the neighboring woods.
But remember a crow knows better than to venture near my house. And the
robins know it.
The chief reason the robins leave us early in the fall is because their
choice food, the worms, have gone into the ground for the winter; but as
soon as the worms start coming to the surface again the robins come
back; and the beauty of it is they come to the same homes, and perch on
the same limbs of our trees, sounding their cheerful notes to brighten
the dark spots in our paths. Between songs they drop down on the lawn
and hop and listen; all at once they start pecking at a grub in the
grass; as soon as they have pecked him out and turned him into a robin
they either listen for more, or jump up and give us another song. By
catching so many mothers of the season’s grubs they render us tens of
dollars worth of service.
Then about July the first the grubs that are not destroyed are under the
hard, dry soil, and the robin has its second family to support; and
Shame! Shame! Shame! on the man who claims to be intelligent who will
slip out and shoot him because he took two cents’ worth of sour cherries
that possibly were not worth picking. Has this man got a heart? If so,
let him go under the tree where the little starving young robins are
calling, “Mamma! mamma! mamma!” That’s the exact interpretation of these
three chirps that are getting fainter and fainter. Now, my brother, let
me ask you again: Have you got a heart? You love your little baby
brother or your darling baby boy, and the very though of King Pharaoh
makes you wicked within; but remember, as cruel as he was, he never
demanded that a baby boy should die a lingering death as these dear
little robins have to do through the fact that you shot their mother.
Personally, I hate to shoot a crow or a grackle, as bad as they are,
during the nesting season, on that account.
Now it would not be fair for me to pass the robin by without giving you
a taste of our enjoyable experience, as while I know that by times
robins will annoy fruit growers by congregating there in hundreds, yet
to be fair we must consider the most good for the most people. So let us
take the average farm, occupied by the cleanest of farmers, with his
corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, and other crops too numerous to
mention, all coming up through the clean, fertile soil. And now, like a
sneaking thief in the night, the annoying cut-worm crawls out like a
snail, cuts down the promising plant and then passes on to another and
repeats his destructive doings. Then when he has gorged himself to the
limit he will just dig himself in under the soil near the stump of the
last plant he has destroyed. I have known fully one-fourth of the plants
in a field to be destroyed by cut-worms in less than five days. Not that
there are so many of them, but, like the weasel, each one is so
destructive. Now just think of the expense and drawback to this farmer,
having to replant. Moreover, the second planting never produces the same
crop as the original one would have done. Here is only one of the
valuable points I could explain for Robin Red Breast. For long before
the average farmer is out of bed, he is in the field, hopping from one
plant to another in search of these worms; and when he gets two or three
in his throat he flies across to his family, and in less than three
minutes he is back again.
Yes, I know there are men who will tell you the robin will not eat
cut-worms and that his song is no better than that of a warty toad. One
of these statements is just as true as the other. The robin will eat
about all kinds of worms I have ever seen excepting the dirty tobacco
worm, and we must give him credit for that. Last summer I saw a young
robin not over six weeks old, picking up ants at the rate of sixty per
minute. What does this mean to your lawn?
Some years ago a boy was passing my house carrying a .22 rifle. I heard
him shoot, so I went out to the road and investigated; went and picked
up the old robin that was fluttering, a few rods away, and as she gasped
her last, two cut-worms spued out of her mouth and a third was squirming
on the ground near where I picked her up. After this boy and I had had a
heart to heart talk about the matter we separated, but that afternoon I
found another robin with a bullet in its back. The next day was Sunday,
and at ten a.m. I was sitting near the window trying to read, and as I
glanced out I saw a young robin, dying, under the fir tree. I soon found
a nest above it, and two larger ones were still alive, but cold. We
brought them in, nest and all, and when they got warm I dropped a little
custard in the mouth of the larger one. This caused number two to
realize that there was some to be had and he, too, awoke from his
slumber, and apparently put all his strength into his neck and jaw
bones, for he opened his mouth so wide that it seemed to split his head
completely in two. The little bits they choked down them immediately
gave them strength to want more, and as soon as they were satisfied, we
covered them up with good warm flannel. When we returned from church
about an hour and a half later and uncovered them, one hopped right up
on the edge of the nest and just squealed for more custard, and in two
days they were out, hopping around us for their feed. In fact I have
never had robins accept us as their step-parents so quickly as these two
did. Possibly when they were in their unconscious state they forgot
their original parent to a certain extent. In two weeks they were flying
all over the premises, but always came to the back door and chirped when
they got hungry, and would stay until some one fed them. Finally they
would follow us men over to the factory and often have I seen them
sitting on the mill, watching the stream of clay run out, now and then
turning their heads sidewise as if they doubted their best eye. Once or
twice I saw them alight on a hot gas pipe; this always made me laugh,
because they got off long before one had to tell them. The next one
might see of them they would be out at the clay bank, watching the man
dig clay, now and then picking out an earth worm. But they never went
near any stranger that happened around, and this point alone brought us
a lot of satisfaction, just to know that these two innocent robins, that
had scarcely been acquainted with us a month, knew every person that
worked around the premises.
These two stayed with us until October and disappeared. But they taught
me one good lesson: What a great mistake I had made, through life, by
keeping my pets shut up, as one bird having its liberty to go and come
at will is worth a hundred in a cage.
Well, that is some years ago, but we have had pet robins ever since. The
last seven or eight years, strangers have been coming here by the
thousands, and all want to feed our robins; we, of course, let them, and
sometimes I will not feed them myself for days. But I often see them
come flying when a bunch of strange people arrives. Why? Just because
they are fed so much by strangers; that is why.
A laughable thing happened last summer. I heard the lady of the house
scolding and shooing with the broom; I found that little Jasper had left
the screen door open and three of his pet robins had flown in and
roosted on his mother’s choice picture that hangs in the cold storage
room, or parlor, as some call it. When Jasper found what the noise was
about he just took the feed tin and went in, gave the pan a few taps
with his spoon, and the birds at once flew down into the pan, the boy
walked out with it and ended all confusion.
[Illustration:
JASPER FEEDING THE ROBINS]
In 1917 we had twenty-one pet robins, and I have often seen little
Jasper start for school and have to come back and feed his pets to keep
them from following him away.
The way we get them is when some neighbor gets afraid his cats are going
to kill the young robins around his place, we get them. If you want to
try it, keep them warm, in a small dry-goods box. When you have had them
about six hours, open their mouths and slip a little custard in them.
The second day they will open their own mouths and in about three days
they will accept you as their stepmother and you can let them out. Be
sure and keep them good and warm, and feed often.
We put tags on some of our robins, and odd ones returned the next
spring, and they are always more wild; in fact when they return they
will not let you near them. This fact I do not understand. My last
experiment was to take two robins out of a nest of four where the parent
birds were the tamest of any I knew; then I went and got one out of a
nest of two, with exceptionally wild parents. The birds were all taken
the same hour. But the two were tamer in two days than the one was in
four.
[Illustration:
SNOWBALL]
This reproduction of a photograph will introduce to you Miss Snowball,
our pure white robin with pink eyes and cream-colored beak and feet.
Snowball was hatched in a nest with three others, but, like the parents,
the other three were just common robins.