This morning's hour of birds on the back porch left me wondering about the robins. I didn't see any. Normally I see several in a given hour, especially in the morning. As I sat with my camera, snapping shots of a very vocal female cardinal, I started thinking more about migration, this behavior that is becoming increasingly interesting to me as summer begins to fade into fall.
Soon, the Ithaca Osprey adults will depart for their journey south, and I will watch them (or their counterparts from other areas) pass through at Blue Marsh Lake or over Hawk Mountain. A month later, they will be joined by their fledglings, who will inexplicably head south, follow an unfamiliar path, and somehow wind up somewhere in South America, with only their inner compass to tell them when to stop. This I learned from David Gessner's Return of the Osprey, which I recently finished.
But do robins migrate? Do they, too, head south, following the same sky highways, until some instinct tells them to stop....and stay for the winter? Some do, birders say. But not all of them. In fact, many of our Berks County robins will stay with us for the winter, resorting to fruit and seeds for food after the worms do their own sort of migration, tunneling deeper into the earth.
Have the worms headed south already, in the beginning of August? If not, where are my robins? Are my backyard robins among the migratory percentage? Has some clock inside them awakened an instinct to fly south for the warmth, or more importantly, for the food?
