For the past two months, we’ve been able to observe a drama on our front porch. It was a life and death struggle that showed both the beauty and cruelty of nature.
The last week of May, we noticed a robin paying a lot of attention to the hanging plant hanging from a hook on the ceiling of our front porch. Whenever, I would sit on the from porch, a robin would fly out of the plant to a nearby branch of a tree and chirp at me incessantly. My curiosity was piqued and on May 28, I held my phone over the nest and took some pictures. I was astonished to see four colorful eggs—colored the distinctive blue labeled in paint samples as “Robin’s Egg Blue.”
In past years, we’ve noticed a nest in this location, but they were usually smaller birds—sparrows or finches. This was the first time I had seen a robin’s nest there. We didn’t know how long the eggs had been there, but research said the chicks usually hatch 12-14 days after the eggs are laid. I observed the nest for the next few days, and three of the eggs hatched on June 6. The final egg hatched on June 7, and I named that chick “Pam” after my wife.
She enjoys sleeping in and taking her time to get moving in the morning and at her accounting firm, the word was don’t speak to Pam for an hour the first thing in the morning until she’s had a cup of tea.
Back to the robin chicks, on June 8 I noticed the mother feeding her babies, most likely insects or worms that she has chewed first. I took a picture and two of the chicks had their beaks wide open and pointed upward for easy feeding. For the first days after hatching, the chicks are blind because their eyes are covered and they don’t have feathers and are covered by orange fuzz.
About two weeks after hatching, the chicks can see and their feathers have appeared. On June 14, we noticed the chicks had feathers and their eyes were open. One of them looked as if it was giving me the “skunk eye” when I took its picture.
During the nesting period, both the female and the male share responsibility for gather food and protecting the chicks. The fledging chicks usually leave the nest about two weeks after hatching. On June 19, I was sitting on the front porch when one of the parents came to the nest and was squabbling with the chicks for about 15 seconds. A few minutes later, another robin (I think) came to the nest and squabbled with the chicks for a few seconds.
The next morning, I found the nest completely empty and totally cleaned out. My hope is that the chicks were able to leave the nest and get on with their lives. As a side note, when the chicks hatch the mother eats the shells which provide a healthy amount of calcium to strengthen her bones. I wonder if the squabbling I heard the day before was the parents telling the chicks it’s time to leave the nest.
Female robins typically lay two brood of eggs each year between April and July. And another robin might lay eggs in a previously used nest during the same season or in future years.
So, it wasn’t a complete shock that about a week later, I noticed another robin hanging around the same hanging plant. I was curious and on June 27, I was surprised to find a single robin egg in the nest and another egg appeared the next day and another next day and the fourth egg appeared on June 30.
I can’t be sure if it was the same mother or a different one, but I was surprised that the nest was occupied again so quickly. We are fortunate that when houses in our neighborhood come up for sale, they don’t stay on the market long. Apparently, the same is true for robin nests.
I continued to monitor the nest and two of the eggs had hatched on July 11, followed by the other two on the twelfth. I didn’t follow this brood every day like the previous one, but on July 17, I noticed the chicks had developed feathers. Again, I didn’t check on the nest for a couple of days.
On July 20, I was shocked to discover that only one chick remained and it had been mauled by a predator. Cats and raccoons are the usual suspects, but I don’t think so this time. The plant basket was hanging a couple of feet away from the wall of the porch and there was no easy way for a ground-based predator to reach it. Blue jays and crows have also been known to attack a robins’ nest and this seems to be the most plausible scenario.
Since there was no trace of three of the chicks, I hope they were able to escape. The statistics say that only about half of the robin chicks hatched will survive to the next year. Since the chicks had hatched less than two weeks before the attack, I am not optimistic about their fate. But the one whose corpse I found in the nest was well-developed, I have a faint hope that the others may have survived.
I said at the beginning of this story, that it was a drama involving life and death and indeed it is. The beauty of this story was observing the very young chicks develop from blind, orange-colored helpless babies to young birds ready to leave the nest two weeks later. The average life span of robins is only about 13 months, but that is a statistical anomaly because the mortality rate for robin chicks is about 50 percent during the first year. Robins who survive their first year typically live 5-6 years and robins in captivity often live for a dozen years or more.
It’s been an interesting process. We decided to bury the mauled robin in its nest in the back yard and move the hanging plant from the porch. So, there won’t be any more nests this season. But Pam will probably hang another plant on our porch next year and I hope as the song says: “The beat goes on.”
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