We feed two very tame robins here - they come onto our hands, and the doorhandles as you may have seen from the recent photos. We discovered there were two when my husband once called me to the front door where a robin was eating from his hand, and I couldn't go because I had one feeding from my hand at the back door!
We have had at least one coming for about eight years, since four year old Ross fed a baby bird some of his cornflakes one morning and it began to follow him around the garden, but we have no way of really knowing whether they are the same ones, although we like to think they are....At least one adult brought its babies to us one year, which was a beautiful thing. According to David Lack (yesterday's post) robins can live to eleven years or more, though most die in their first sixteen months. It is very hard for even the experts to tell the sex of a robin, or to tell one from another unless they are ringed.
'While a robin's life-span is only about a ninth of that of a man, all the bird's activities are much more rapid so that its time-scale is different. The pulse-rate of a redstart is 980 beats a minute, which is about fourteen times as fast as that of a man, and, since the redstart is closely related to the robin and about the same size, its pulse-rate is probably similar. Reckoned in terms of heart-beats, and eleven year old robin is equivalent to a man 150 years old.'
From The Life of the Robin by David Lack
We have had at least one coming for about eight years, since four year old Ross fed a baby bird some of his cornflakes one morning and it began to follow him around the garden, but we have no way of really knowing whether they are the same ones, although we like to think they are....At least one adult brought its babies to us one year, which was a beautiful thing. According to David Lack (yesterday's post) robins can live to eleven years or more, though most die in their first sixteen months. It is very hard for even the experts to tell the sex of a robin, or to tell one from another unless they are ringed.
'While a robin's life-span is only about a ninth of that of a man, all the bird's activities are much more rapid so that its time-scale is different. The pulse-rate of a redstart is 980 beats a minute, which is about fourteen times as fast as that of a man, and, since the redstart is closely related to the robin and about the same size, its pulse-rate is probably similar. Reckoned in terms of heart-beats, and eleven year old robin is equivalent to a man 150 years old.'
From The Life of the Robin by David Lack
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