Chapter 4: Of Property and Passion

The wooing of the robin is a disappointment to believers in romance. There are no grotesque dances such as highlight the courtship of many bird species; no fights over females, no song that is exclusively a mating call. In the practical mind of the male robin, a choice of territory looms far more important than a choice of mate. Under such haphazard arrangements, a robin may get together with the mate he had the previous summer. Then again, he may not.

Many robin fanciers may violently object to Trenary’s harsh synopsis of robin courtship. For although the species’ mating is frequently conducted with restrained discretion (to the great frustration of voyeurish ornithologists), it can alternatively involve a variety of romantic exchanges between the participants. On one point, however, Trenary is indubitably correct: Robins (of both sexes) are landowners first and lovers only second. Mating, to be sure, is an indispensable delight without which robins would lead an extremely ephemeral existence. But evidence strongly suggests that the male becomes more attached to his territory than to his spouse, and that the female is similarly more loyal to her nesting premises than to her nesting partner.

Territory

Territoriality—the tendency to form strong attachments to a given area of space and to defend that area against intruders—is a trait which robins display almost exclusively during their breeding season. In one account, robins who were wintering on the Stanford University campus in California appeared to stake out territories as individualized feeding areas, but such behavior during the nonbreeding season is exceptional. More typically, male robins only select territories when they reach their northern breeding grounds in spring (often before the females have arrived in strength), defend it with the help of their mates throughout the summer, and then relinquish their claims when fall descends.

Although the average robin territory is about a half acre in size, larger properties are possible where population pressures are weak (that is, where robins are few in number) and smaller territories occur where such pressures are great. Usually those males who are first to appear north try to claim much larger areas than they will later be able to hold after the other local residents have arrived. Interestingly, even after all the residents have resettled a given region, several attractive areas will remain unclaimed regardless of population pressures. These areas are communal feeding grounds which are open to the public and cannot be privately owned. Dozens of local robins will regularly gather to forage at such locations, which typically lie on football fields, cemetery lawns, golf courses, or other wide stretches of short-cropped grass.

Although the boundaries of a given territory often follow distinct topographical features—a street, a building, a row of hedges—the borders sometimes run inexplicably down the centers of open lawns. In general, the owners have claim to every resource existing within those borders (nesting sites, building materials, bathing areas and food), but such rights are by no means inviolable. Trespassing by neighboring redbreasts occurs quite frequently. In addition, territories sometimes overlap, especially in densely populated areas, so that a given piece of real estate might be shared by two different pairs of birds. Apparently the situation can occasionally get even more complicated, for once a pair of robins in New Jersey held nesting rights in a certain tree even though another pair possessed the foraging rights to the surrounding lawn.

Characteristics of Territoriality

Through the course of studying a wide variety of animals, scientists have constructed a classic model of territorial traits. According to this model, for example, an animal fighting within its own territory is nearly invincible against all intruding challengers. Thus,

in all territorial species, without exception, possession of a territory lends enhanced energy to the proprietor… The challenger is almost invariably defeated, the intruder expelled. In part, there seems some mysterious flow of energy and resolve which invests a proprietor on his home grounds. But likewise, so marked is the inhibition lying on the intruder, so evident his sense of trespass, we may be permitted to wonder if in all territorial species there does not exist…some universal recognition of territorial rights.

One corollary of this invincibility principle is that an animal becomes progressively less successful the farther it fights from the center of its property.

Other characteristics of the classic territorial model include: (1) males are, with few exceptions, more territorially inclined than females; (2) territorial aggression does not generally occur interspecifically—that is, between members of two different species (“A squirrel does not regard a mouse as a trespasser,” in Ardrey’s words); and (3) a territorial animal is seldom aggressive when meeting conspecifics outside of its territory.

Robins, who seem to have been largely overlooked by students of territorial behavior, do not match the above model very well. And nowhere is their disdain for such scientific generalities more blatant than regarding the widely accepted notion of territorial invincibility. As notorious trespassers, redbreasts seldom show much respect for the “territorial rights” of their neighbors. Secondly, robins are not always—nor nearly always—successful in repelling intruders, for the latter may actually win 30 percent of all territorial clashes. Thirdly, property owners are sometimes remarkably tolerant of freshly discovered trespassers and may not even confront the intruders at all.

In short, although robins do benefit by fighting on their home ground (winning 70 percent of the contests occurring therein), they are by no means invincible. While many invaders are expelled, many others are either ignored or unsuccessfully fought. In the latter instances, landowners seem to retain their properties by simply remaining within them while the unrepelled invaders move leisurely onward (though frequently not victorious, proprietors are only rarely defeated to the point of surrendering their territories to challengers). Property attachment, therefore, is just as important as combat proficiency in the territorial aptitude of the American Robin.

Robins do conform nicely to at least one aspect of the invincibility principle—namely, that fighting success declines as a bird strays farther and farther from the center of its territory. Thus Robins win over 80 percent of the disputes occurring in the middle of their properties, compared to 60 percent at the territorial boundaries and only about 30 percent a hundred yards beyond those boundaries. Apparently, whatever underlies the home-ground advantage does not vanish abruptly at the property’s borders but instead dissipates only gradually as a function of distance from the territorial center.

As mentioned earlier, territorial behavior in most species characterizes the male rather than the female (a few exceptions include Horned Owls and Ring-tailed Lemurs, in whom territories are defended by both sexes; Button Quail, in whom females alone are territorial; and wolves and humans, who often defend territorial borders as groups of individuals). In robins, the female is definitely territorially minded. The male establishes the territory initially and thereafter makes many more territorial defenses than does the female, who is after all pressed by the duties of nest-building and egg-incubation. But the female is perfectly capable of maintaining a territory entirely by herself and will indeed do so should her mate suddenly disappear during a given nesting cycle.

Interestingly, the two sexes show differences regarding the advantage accrued by fighting on home ground. Females win about 75 percent of the fights within their own territories compared to only 20 percent in the territories of opponents, while males win less than 70 percent of the fights in their own territories compared to about 45 percent within the properties of opponents. Clearly, the home-ground advantage is a more potent force for female robins than for males.

Another sex difference in the aggression of robins is that males seem to be a bit dominant over females. There are exceptions, as in the case of a one-eyed fellow who—perhaps because of his handicap—was consistently henpecked by his unsympathetic spouse. But as far as territorial defense is concerned, males win approximately 65 percent of all disputes occurring between the sexes.

Robins, then, present a much more complex picture of sex differences in territoriality than seems to be portrayed in most other species. The males initially establish the territories and then have primary responsibility in its defense; nevertheless, the somewhat subordinate females do contribute significantly to the effort. And while both sexes benefit from fighting within their own territories, it is the females, rather than males, who show the home-ground advantage most strongly.

The third general characteristic of territorial behavior—the lack of strife between animals who belong to different species—does not apply to the robin any better than the concepts of invincibility and male exclusiveness. Although redbreasts tolerate the presence of many non-robins in their territories, they will with regularity drive certain species from their nesting areas. Not surprisingly, many of these repelled animals are among the robin’s traditional enemies. Thus robins will attack jays, crows and squirrels, all of whom loot robin nests of eggs and young; cats and dogs, who are major threats to flightless robin youngsters just out of their nests; hawks and owls, who prey upon young and old robins alike; grackles, who not only compete with robins for nesting sites but also try to puncture their eggs; and the female cowbird, a social parasite who often tries to sneak her own egg into an unattended robin’s nest. Other birds who are normally ignored may be bullied by a greedy robin under special competitive circumstances, such as at a crowded mealworm-filled birdfeeder but this is not usually considered territorial behavior. Of course, robins themselves are sometimes attacked by other species, such as the territorial Mockingbird and Wood Thrush, and frequently the scrappy English Sparrow with whom the much larger robin usually seems unable to cope.

The final territorial characteristic mentioned earlier—a prevailing lack of aggression between individuals outside of their territories—is most certainly untrue of robins who may be quite quarrelsome even when great distances from their nestsites. At the communal feeding grounds where dozens of individuals may gather for breakfast, scuffles are not at all scarce even though, somewhat paradoxically, the birds generally try to avoid direct confrontations.

Aggressive Behaviors

Robins brandish many bellicose behaviors. Each of these may occasionally appear in some context other than territorial dispute, such as mate rivalry, birdfeeder squabbling, or periodic flares of temper wherever robins happen to flock together. Nevertheless, aggressiveness in redbreasts is most frequently ignited by the fires of territoriality.

One common hostile gesture is the tail lift, in which the aggressor humbles head and raises rump to issue a threat of battle. A similar warning is conveyed by the crouch, in which the individual’s whole body is simply lowered to the ground or a perch. To complement either of these postures, or to communicate displeasure from even a normal stance, robins may repeatedly open and shut their empty mandibles to produce a bill-snap sound that is likely to intimidate any nearby foe. Alternatively, the birds may simply hold their beaks open in a wide gaping gesture. Both the gape and the bill-snap probably represent “intention movements” which indicate the performer’s willingness to bite an opponent.

Singing is another behavioral weapon in the robin’s arsenal. Although “song duels” of the sort found in some birds have not been reported for robins, the male’s carol is nonetheless believed to deter other males from entering the singer’s territory. This behavior can thus fulfill its antagonistic function even in the absence of visual contact between two birds. The male’s carol probably also serves to attract eligible females to the crooner’s corner.

A somewhat more dynamic form of aggression is the push (also called supplanting) which is most frequently demonstrated when one robin approaches another on the ground through a series of intermittent bursts of running. As the aggressing individual repeatedly nears the other bird, the latter repeatedly scampers off a few yards in hasty retreat. Should pushing be performed among the treetops, the aggressor simply flies toward his there upon-fleeing opponent and then lands on or near the perch which the latter has just vacated. In either case, the pursuer—armed with a strange repelling force like that arising between the “like” poles of two magnets—employs proximity to shove the other bird away. When occurring within the pusher’s territory, the chase sequence ends as soon as a property boundary is crossed, for then the landowner stops the pursuit.

Nip-n-tuck flying is a sort of pushing that’s gotten out of hand. Here, one bird flies hard on the heels of another at seemingly top speed, the pair at first skimming just above the ground, then weaving between trees and bushes, now curling into upward rolls like virtuoso flyers of World War I vintage. Screaming all the while, the two may soon be joined by several others to form a contagious dogfight of angry Red Barons.

All of the aggressive behaviors described so far involve little if any physical contact; their effects, though usually sufficient to induce fleeing by the aggressed-against individual, are strictly psychological. Nitty gritty combat can occur, however, as in the case of wing-jousting. In this engagement, two contestants initially face each other on the ground, a yard or so apart; then, as if signaled by some invisible referee, they simultaneously fly up together, buffeting with wings, clawing with feet, and biting with beaks. Rising ten to twenty feet in their furious breast-to-breast battle, the birds soon tumble back to the ground, reorient toward each other, and joust again and again until one knight yields by simply wandering away. For all its fury, jousting seldom results in any real damage beyond plucked feathers and bruised wings.

A final aggressive display, this one far more notable for its flare than effectiveness, is shadow-boxing. Whenever a male robin flies, hops or perches near a well-washed window or super-shiny hubcap, he is inevitably confronted with the redbreasted “intruder” reflected therein. Responding to the challenge, the bird begins to buffet and peck his image quite mercilessly, whereupon his spunky opponent usually replies in kind. Sometimes sparring thus for days, the indefatigable featherweight only occasionally retires to some neutral corner for food between rounds. One persistent pugilist in Kansas City skirmished with his glassy silhouette for sixteen days in March, and only interrupted the struggle for brief food forays and periodic withdrawals “to his telephone wire for rest and contemplation.” Another stubborn Spartan, this one on Detroit’s Belle Isle Park, dueled and dashed against a gas station’s windowpane for the better part of one April. Throughout his thirty days’ war, he

was kept pretty busy without being able to administer a knockout blow. After each attack the hated enemy would spring up as peppery as before. The female during this time remained on the lower limb of a nearby tree, occasionally making remarks.

I can well imagine what she was saying. And with good cause, for shadow-boxing is quite as costly as it is foolish. Not only is the male prevented from tending to more serious family business, but he is typically distracted to dangerous degrees; indeed, a cat can sometimes approach within mere feet of the heedless and, perhaps soon, headless fighter. At the very least, the bulldoggish battering not only bloodies the boxer but blunts his beak as well. How can a truce be enforced upon an image-punching robin? A murky screen over the window should ward off the bellicose reflection, while a shiny hubcap can be wheeled into a garage or else out of the redbreast’s beloved territory.

We might now digress somewhat and consider an interesting notion concerning the robin’s red breast. Many animals, it seems, automatically respond with hostility to the mere sight of a certain part of a conspecific’s body. A male stickleback fish, for example, becomes belligerent as soon as it sees the red throat of another male. The crucial importance of the red throat is revealed by the fact that the male will not attack a female stickleback (females do not have the redness) but will attack an object that does not resemble a fish at all but which happens to be colored red on its underside. A male stickleback, for instance, once became quite aggressive toward a red-bottomed truck as it drove past a window near the fish’s aquarium.

As another example of this principle, the English Robin is triggered into aggressiveness by the sight of another robin’s red breast. Thus conspecifics whose breasts are experimentally painted brown will be completely ignored by the little bird; in contrast, a mere tuft of red feathers mounted on a perch will be vehemently attacked. Other examples of such aggression-eliciting cues include the black “moustache” sported by the male American Flicker, the deep blue throat that decorates the neck of the European Emerald Lizard, and the purple-and-white arms of the male Cuttlefish.

No one yet has conclusively demonstrated that our American Robin responds aggressively to simply the sight of another robin’s red breast; still, it seems probable that the species does not differ significantly from the English Robin in this respect. This would explain why a robin becomes trapped into sparring with a window (since the glass persistently reflects the bird’s own red breast back to him); why wing-jousting—which seems to represent nearly equal aggressiveness in two combatants—only occurs after both birds have directly faced each other (since this is the only orientation which permits both birds to simultaneously view each other’s breast); and why juvenile robins are seldom attacked by adults (since the breasts of youngsters are largely spotted and possess little if any red coloring). In sum, it may well be that the very heart of aggression among robins lies in the redbreasts’ red breasts.

Benefits of Territoriality

Most of the benefits that robins gain by being territorial derive from the dispersal effects that territoriality imposes upon their population. True, territories can both compress and overlap, and thus do not scatter the birds as effectively as they otherwise might. Nevertheless, robins are still more spaced out as a result of their territoriality than they would be without it.

One potential advantage of population spacing is inhibition of the spread of contagious diseases. As we shall see in Chapter 10, however, robins may negate this benefit by sleeping in dense flocks on summer evenings. But if territorial spacing does not make robins more resistant to disease, it at least makes their nests less susceptible to predation. Finding one robin’s nest does not in the least aid a crow or squirrel in the discovery of another robin’s nest; in fact, finding one nest practically ensures that another will not be found nearby. Thus predators cannot go on rampages of mass destruction and rob dozens of nests in a single afternoon or evening, as might instead be the case were robins to breed in tight colonies.

Another benefit of population spacing is to help ensure that robins do not deplete the food supplies within a given area. Although food scarcity is seldom a significant problem for nonbreeding robins who are mobile enough to find greener pastures, food resources become of paramount importance during the nesting season when parents as well as young are anchored to specific localities. By spacing their nests, robins can usually find food for both themselves and their ever-hungry young within their respective territories. Robins, remember, abandon their territoriality during most of the nonbreeding season; thus territoriality and breeding go hand in hand.

A more subtle benefit linking territoriality to food availability and breeding involves the incubation duties of the female robin. Throughout the two-week incubation period, the female obviously needs to obtain nourishment and yet cannot leave her eggs unwatched and unwarmed during extended food-gathering excursions. In many avian species, the male solves this problem by feeding his mate as she sits on the nest. The male robin, being perhaps too busy patrolling his territory, seldom serves dinner to his mate; nonetheless, the fact that he maintains a territory helps abate the female’s dilemma. By discouraging other robins from foraging in the vicinity of the nest, the male fences off an area in which his mate need not compete with other redbreasts when she interrupts her sitting to feed. Consequently she doesn’t have to stray far in search of food, and thus she is able to keep her time off the nest minimally brief.

Another possible benefit of territorial spacing is the functional isolation of mating pairs, whereby each couple is permitted to conduct family business without undue interference from other robins. Without territorial restrictions, unmated individuals might be forever attempting to seduce one member of an already established pair. Such temptations would hardly be conducive to the stable sort of family situation needed to rear young.

Competition among nestlings is perhaps even more dangerous to family stability than is mate-rivalry. In one unusual case where two females nested side by side after mating with a bigamous male, one set of eggs hatched a full week before the other set. Unfortunately, the bigger and more vigorous older nestlings—who could clamor for food much more insistently than their newly hatched neighbors—dominated the attention of both mothers so completely that the neglected batch of infants soon died. Here, then, was a type of family interference that territorial spacing most assuredly helps to minimize.

There are two other possible benefits that territoriality bestows upon robins, but neither involves population spacing effects. One derives from the fact that robins, by constantly patrolling their properties, become intimate with the characteristics of the terrain therein. This familiarity may offer several advantages to the landowner, not the least of which is some sort of “confidence” inherently arising from fighting in familiar rather than strange surroundings. In other words, familiarity-caused confidence may underlie the home-ground advantage that was described earlier. Detailed acquaintance with the nesting area may also offer robins some measure of security against predators since the birds know at any given instant where best to hide when danger threatens.

Territory can also serve to select the “best” robins for breeding. This is so because females seem to be more attracted to the property that a male holds than to the male himself. Should, for example, her original mate suffer a coup d’état and be dispossessed of his holdings (which rarely, but sometimes, happens), the female usually accepts the new lord quite readily rather than following the vanquished male into exile. Certainly male robins who are not strong and bold enough to hold territories are unlikely to obtain mates. It may further be that the most desirable territories—presumably held by the best males—are competitively sought by the females as well; thus territory could mediate a system whereby the best males breed with the best females.

Mating

Although spring normally marks the initiation of sexual activity in robins, some individuals occasionally cast good sense to the wind and attempt mating during winter months. In one case, robins who were migrating through Berkeley, California, repeatedly engaged in sporadic copulatory behavior even though February had only just begun. Even more extraordinary are instances of premature breeding that have included midwinter nesting attempts. One pair of robins in Elwood City, Pennsylvania, managed to fill a nest with three eggs during an unusually mild December. With the onset of January, however, came five-inch snowfalls that virtually inundated the nest. Nevertheless, the shivering female—who was able to eat at a nearby birdfeeder which her mate guarded against other birds—remained on her eggs a full seventeen days. Unfortunately the extraordinary efforts of these would-be parents were in vain, for the eggs, probably killed by the cold, never hatched.

Somewhat better success was achieved by another pair of January nesters who managed to hatch three eggs in downtown Columbus, Ohio. For two days thereafter, relatively warm weather permitted the parents to find enough worms (the only food available) to feed their youngsters, but a sudden drop to 12°F drove the annelids far beneath the frozen ground and doomed the hapless infants. These robins had nested across the street from a large display involving thousands of Christmas lights. In view of the fact that “unnatural” lighting conditions have been known to induce breeding in numerous animals (for example, pheasants, rats and trout), it was possible that the Christmas lights had prompted the Columbian redbreasts to breed prematurely.

Even when robins wait for the proper season to breed, their mating behavior may be quite improper. For example, robins are overwhelmingly monogamous creatures who normally are devoted to only one mate at a time; every once in a while, however, polygamy manages to rear its lusty rump. Such marital exceptions always seem to take the form of polygyny (two females and only one male), as no cases of two males mated to one female have ever been reported. Nor for that matter have there been reports of any frolicking foursomes.

When two females mate with one male, they may either build separate nests, sometimes one right next to the other, or they may build a single nest to hold both sets of eggs. In the latter case, the females must adopt some satisfactory strategy for incubating their eggs, and for this they usually follow one of two different procedures. Some pairs of females incubate in equal shifts, with one bird periodically relieving the other; others, however, prefer to sit simultaneously side by side or, if the nest is too cramped for that, to piggyback one another in mountainous maternal majesty.

The fact that robins are primarily monogamous, of course, does not imply that they mate for life. Many different birds do so—including lovebirds, pigeons, geese, swans, and most birds of prey—but robins, alas, do not. True, robins, who usually rear two or three broods per summer, almost always remain tied to the same spouse for successive broods within a single season. But from one year to the next, males and females tend to get as scrambled as Sunday morning eggs. In fact, only the faithful return of both sexes to their previous territories permits any chance of successive remating at all; that is, since both males and females return to the same northern locality each spring (as opposed to resettling at random places throughout the continent), chance rematings are at least possible. Nevertheless, these “accidents” are thought to characterize only one out of every eight or so pairs of returning redbreasts.

The longest record of remating in robins appears to be held by a pair who nested for three successive years in Columbus, Ohio. This relatively devoted couple was particularly interesting because during the spring of the third year the male was initially seen in the company of a strange, early-arriving female instead of his previous mate. Within a few days, however, his old flame had returned and the newcomer, perhaps not coincidentally, had disappeared. Thus,

it may well be that a female robin, on returning and finding her place pre-empted, does not calmly accept the situation and go elsewhere, as does the Song Sparrow female, but that she drives off her rival.

Relatively little is known about the courtship behavior of the robin. Much of the problem is that the birds’ wooing appears under so many different guises that generalizations concerning its nature are evasive. The following first-hand accounts, beginning with some observations of John Audubon, readily convey the wide variety of courtship strategies which a male robin may employ:

I have often seen him at the earliest dawn of a May morning, strutting around her with all the pomposity of a pigeon. Sometimes along a space of ten to twelve yards, he is seen with his tail fully spread, his wings shaking and his throat inflated, running over the grass and brushing it, until he nears his mate; (next) he moves round her several times without once rising from the ground. She then receives his caresses.

The male’s pomposity, however, may evolve into gladiatorial maneuvers should a rival suddenly intrude. Thus one snowy April morn did a woman in Danvers, Massachusetts, watch a male robin approach a female just as another male landed near her. Outraged, the first bird attacked and

with a loud cry drove the interloper around the corner of the house. But as he turned the corner in hot pursuit a gust of the April breeze caught him sidewise, whirled him about, and drove him back over a strip of ice that gave him no footing, though his feet moved rapidly in the effort to overtake his rival… Then he looked to his female only to find that his rival, who had flown over the house and back to the trysting place, was with her again. With a shrill scream of rage the baffled suitor flew at his rival with open mouth, driving him from the vicinity.

Things may get even more hectic when a single female attracts a bevy of males. Describing what he called “robin racket,” naturalist John Burroughs wrote of

trains of three or four birds rushing pell-mell over the lawn and fetching up in a tree or bush, or occasionally upon the ground, all piping and screaming at the top of their voices, but whether in mirth or anger it is hard to tell. The nucleus of the train is a female. One cannot see that the males in pursuit of her are rivals; it seems rather as if they had united to hustle her out of the place. But somehow the matches are no doubt made and sealed during these mad rushes.

Apparently, such behavior—which is obviously similar to the nip-’n-tuck flying described earlier—can be either territorial or romantic in nature.

Finally, Robin courtship may be neither pompous, chivalrous nor raucous, but instead simply serene. The following description of a robin suitor comes from ornithologist Bradford Torrey:

How gently he approaches his beloved! How carefully he avoids ever coming disrespectfully near! No sparrow-like screaming, no dancing about, no melodramatic gesticulation. If she moves from one side of the tree to the other, or to the tree adjoining, he follows in silence. Yet every movement is a petition, an assurance that his heart is hers and ever must be.

All of the above observations, of course, deal with the preliminaries of mating rather than with its consummation. The latter is usually a restrained, uninspiring joining that evinces little in the way of fiery desire by either participant. More specifically, the female simply crouches on either the ground or a perch and is briefly mounted by the male who—fanning his wings for balance—presses his cloaca against that of his mate.

Occasionally, however, a bird succumbs to the pleasures of passion and veritably sizzles in a frantic fit of frenzied fervor. One male in Baltimore repeatedly mounted one of his own offspring (of unknown gender) during its first day out of the nest. While the wide-eyed youngster froze in squatted stupefaction, its overly affectionate father copulated no less than four times during one satisfying if exhausting thirty-second period. In a comparable account, a female once tried to mount one of her own fledglings; this was particularly interesting since the normal sexual behavior of female robins involves squatting, not mounting.

Then there was the case of an ardent male who went berserk in the face of unrequited passion. This fellow

advanced on the female with his wings slightly open, bill gaping, and body feathers extended, and tried to mount. She drove him away with a vicious peck. The male then mounted an earth clump, fanned his wings vigorously as he tried to copulate with it, then ran and tried to mount the female again. She dodged and ran a few steps; the male then tried to copulate with a piece of crumpled newspaper, again fanning his wings vigorously, then went to the female and attempted to mount from the front, but was again driven off. He returned once more; this time the female squatted and he mounted, apparently successfully. The female then violently attacked him and chased him away, the two flying out of sight in a long, twisting fight.

Other reported examples of robin debauchery include an immature bird who, apparently smoking with passion, tried to mate with a package of cigarettes; two females who attacked a male after the latter unwisely ignored their squatting invitations to copulate; and a male who, during pitched battle with another male, suddenly grabbed his opponent by the neck and then mounted him with dishonorable intentions. (The surprise maneuver worked, for the assaulted bird promptly fled in mortified retreat.)

In closing this account of the robin’s mating habits, we should perhaps simply emphasize that the bulk of our discussion has focused on exceptional rather than typical behavior. For most robins, mating is strictly a spring and summertime sport that is played with only two on a team, and seldom with the same partner from one year to the next. Courtship—while sometimes showy—more often goes unwitnessed by humans, and copulation—while occasionally misdirected—is more often brusque, businesslike, and to the point. Robins are, after all, lovers only second.