Watch The Birdie

I wrote about the robin that has been building a nest amongst our gardening clutter in my previous post, when it had begun exhibiting what might have been display behaviour to attract a mate. Although we'd seen other (male) robins passing through the garden (the females and males can be told apart in the breeding season because the former are much plumper) there was none of the "courtship feeding" of the female by the male that one expected.

Then on Friday 14 March the bird was sitting in the nest, its little eyes and a splash of red just visible amongst the brown-on-brown of the plumage and dead leaves. A check later, when it had temporarily vacated the nest, showed that it contained two little eggs. (However, they were impossible to photograph, since the depth of the nest and the shelves' vertical separation meant they couldn't be seen without first poking in a mirror.) The bird was absent altogether on Saturday; but was back in the garden on Sunday, with an attendant male. They were (as ground-feeding birds are) very interested in the soil that Judith was turning over; the male duly found a small earthworm, stunned it against the side of a pot, and fed it to the female. Courtship feeding!

On Monday morning, there were four eggs in the nest. Since Monday morning, the female has been sitting there full-time, so there may be more: we won't know until the chicks start hatching around a fortnight from now. We have seen the flash of the male, coming and going with food; where he stays overnight is unknown. (It's certainly not with our female.) I took the following photograph this morning, standing on a chair inside the open side door using the camera's telephoto function; it was very difficult to bring the bird into proper focus (that brown-on-brown of plumage and dead leaves), but I'll keep a watch and try again at a suitable future juncture. (If only I'd thought to remove that white-capped bottle in the foreground while the bird was still building its nest, eh?)

Birthday Robin

On Monday, Judith turns 60 (as you well know). Because that's a weekday, and I haven't yet retired, we went out for dinner yesterday evening, to El Botellon, a new(ish) tapas restaurant that has recently opened on the High Road and is probably a symbol of the manner in which Tottenham has begun to shake off its previous reputation and is beginning to move upscale, gentrifying in the way that Hoxton and Shoreditch did a couple of decades ago (and as a consequence of which have now become too expensive for the young middle-class professionals who "rescue" such areas from their post-industrial slump). This morning, we had breakfast in the conservatory, in the sunshine -- despite the storm surges and flooding that characterised the two months from late December to early February, it's been a mild winter, and the temperatures this weekend have nudged up to 17-18 degrees C, which is unprecedented for this time of year.





In other news, we have a robin building a nest in a box of gardening items on a shelf outside our back door. Robins are renowned for building their nests in all sorts of places -- they've even been known to nest inside garden sheds -- and this one obviously has no problems with our proximity. At first, we thought it was a male; but when we checked, we learned that it's the females which build the nests, while the males do absolutely no work whatever (apart, of course, from eating-shooting-and-leaving). Sunny days are when it's most active, bringing in bits of dried grass and moss to furnish the nest; it stays away on dull and overcast days, for reasons that are not at all apparent. It hasn't yet started roosting overnight in the nest, but given the speed at which spring is advancing -- the pear tree is near to bud-burst, for example -- it can't be too long before the first eggy pops ite.

The last three of the photographs below were taken this very morning -- it was sitting in a several prominent places, cheeping occasionally. We suspect this behaviour occurs when it's trying to attract a mate.