Robins are everywhere this year. They’re common birds here, but there seem to be more of them than usual.
One mother robin has hatched her chicks in a nest high in the fork of a birch tree outside my second-floor window: at least twenty feet in the air. It’s a good spot for protecting them from predators. Skunks couldn’t climb that high, and raccoons,opossums, or snakes likely wouldn’t. But the chicks will have to be mature enough to break their fall when they leave the nest, or the drop will surely kill them.
I hope they make it.
I’ve loved watching this determined little bird build this nest, and sit on her blue eggs through one spring storm after another, often when the wind lashed the tree violently. Now she’s diligent about foraging and feeding the sorry-looking hatchlings.
Here’s the same nest, a few days later. The nest is already impossibly full of nestlings clamoring for food.
Meanwhile, in another, lower nest in the viburnum bushes by the deck, another brood of robins is rapidly growing up. The parents are busy all day getting enough food for these chicks.
My coming near enough to the nest to photograph it upset both parents, who fussed and flittered till I retreated.
