Robin Chicks Update

We noticed last weekend that the female robin had ceased mothering the chicks overnight; since then, unless she's bringing in food for the chicks and removing their faecal sacs, she's not spending any time at the nest at all. We speculate that this may be attributable to the parasites which the chicks have acquired from the nesting materials, a speculation reinforced by the time spent by the female preening herself last weekend: perched in the apple trees outside the conservatory, she would work methodically through her wing feathers, under her wings and down her breast, clearly removing (and eating!) ticks and mites. (Leaving the chicks alone in the nest overnight may also be a simple survival strategy: if a predator gets the chicks, the parents will live to breed again; conversely, if one of the parents is taken out, the other will be able to continue feeding the chicks.)

There has also been a change in the robins' behaviour around us. On the one hand, they now clearly associate the provision of mealworms with us, even to the extent of anticipating my appearance in the garden at 6.00am to replenish the feeders (an open tray on a pole and a ground tray in a cage on the lawn) -- I barely get back inside the house before both parents are stuffing their beaks with provender (in the case of the open tray, because they have to get some in before the bigger starlings arrive and scare them off -- the ground tray is newer, and it took the robins a few days to recognise its existence....although they have to compete for the feed therein with a pair of great tits, flying in from a neighbouring garden). On the other hand, they respond quite differently if they think we might be threatening the chicks. Robins are famously tolerant of human proximity; were that not the case, the female would never have built the nest so close to our kitchen door. Although we currently use that door as little as possible to avoid disturbing the chicks, there are occasions when we need to open it to add stuff to the worm bin; the noise of this immediately prompts the female to fly in and take up what looks very like a "guard-attack" position on an adjacent shelf until we've closed the door and she can resume her food-gathering duties.

The chicks have also been growing fast. Below are three photographs, taken (respectively) on Monday, Friday and today (Sunday), showing their development -- from the tip of a beak poking above the rim of the nest to juveniles within a few days of fledging. What the photographs don't show is how active they've become: they have been generally inert and huddled down in the nest when the parent birds aren't there with food for them, but at other times have begun to raise themselves in the nest, stretch out their necks and exercise their flight muscles. This activity is the reason for the slight blurriness of the third photograph: the chick at the back looks larger than the others, but that's because it's pushed itself up in the nest and a few seconds later was scrambling over the others to take up a new position at the front. Fledging must be imminent....