Robin Transactions

Yesterday (Saturday) we caught our first glimpses of the chicks in the nest; and this weekend marked a change in the parent birds' feeding behaviour.

The chicks are just visible (if one knows what to look for) above the rim of the nest as fluffy dark bundles which wobble about a bit -- at less than a week old, they are clearly very unsteady on their feet. When a parent flies in with some food, all rise up, their yellow beaks agape; we count four of them. They're very difficult to photograph, both because they keep crashing into one another and because they're partly screened by the parent bird; but below is the best of the many photographs (all the rest even more blurred or out-of-focus) that I took. We also saw, for the very first time, the female bird carry away a faecal sac -- a soft white pellet -- from one of the chicks, which perhaps suggests that (contrary to my previous robin post) she hadn't been eating them after all.



As to feeding: hitherto, the female has spent the bulk of her time on the nest, receiving food from the male for both herself and the chicks; this behaviour was so ingrained that on the rare occasions that the female had left the nest the male bird would usually await her return -- perched on the plant hanging bracket outside the kitchen door or on the shelf above the nest -- rather than deliver his beakfuls of grubs and small worms directly to the chicks. But sometime on Saturday, that changed: the female started leaving the nest to forage for both herself and the chicks for longer and longer periods, until by the end of the day she -- like the male -- was visiting the nest solely to feed the chicks. She was still active until very late, not returning to sit on the chicks until it was almost fully dark.

Today has been rather less mild, and more windy, than the past couple of days; both birds have nevertheless been active foragers, in our garden -- it's notable that there are particular patches of bare soil they like to investigate -- and (presumably) others. (The two gardens either side of ours are not particularly kempt, and so are doubtless thronged with small invertebrates.) Below is a photograph of the female robin, sunning herself in the fresh air on Saturday.