Chapter 12: Robins and People

I went down through the garden calling softly, “Bobby, Bobby,” but there was no reply. Then a search was made. Under the grapevine was found his body, the breast torn and bloody, shot by an air-rifle at close range. Bobby was undoubtedly waiting under the grape-arbor for his breakfast, and when a boy approached with his rifle, he just thought it was another kind human to feed him. And so he faced the boy confidently and trustingly and received the cruel shot in his breast.

That little lame robin taught me many lovely things that I could not have learned in any other way. He taught me that our robins have a high degree of intelligence, that they are perfectly capable of learning new things. He taught me that the fear of human beings is not instinctive but is taught them by the parent birds. He taught me that our wild birds are capable of love, trust, and devotion. I taught him only one thing: that was to love and trust human beings, and that was his undoing.

In describing the life cycle of the American Robin, we have noted many points of intersection with the lifeways of humans. Some of these junctions have been characterized by great injury, for we have slaughtered robins in southern roosts, poisoned them with pernicious pesticides, and blasted them with thundering shotguns. But there have been benevolent interactions as well. Early colonists fondly christened robins after their beloved English bird; homeowners welcome robins as nesting neighbors and adopt helpless nestlings when circumstances demand; human passersby often aid troubled robins who are entangled with string, undernourished during a snowy winter, or stranded north in the fall.

In short, people are sometimes the enemies of robins and sometimes their friends. And whatever that truism may lack in profundity is, I’m afraid, more than compensated by immutability. And yet pause for a moment. Does contemplation of our double-edged relationship with robins really lack profundity, or does it simply seem to because it is so obvious? There is, I believe, something deeply important to be inferred from the marked antithesis that frequently exists in human values—values such as those experienced by Bobby, a little lame robin who lived in the hands of human compassion and died at the hands of human callosity.

Other thoughts, perhaps, could be derived from our survey of Turdus migratorius but two robins are tapping at my window now and I’ve never been able to resist their invitations.