Miraculous March Robins

The morning after last Thursday’s (March 16) snowstorm, I observed a large flock of March robins raiding berries from an ornamental tree located at the corner of 14th Ave SW and 6th St SW.

With the ground still frozen and covered by several inches of new snow, and no earthworms to be had, this flock of early-arriving robins must have been searching for any alternative food source it could find. They hit the jackpot with the thousands of berries still clinging to this tree from last fall.

Members of this flock, estimated at about fifty birds, were taking turns swooping in from the cover of some nearby arbor vitae trees.

At one point, there were about thirty robins perched in the berry-laden branches of this tree, all of them hungrily gulping berries.

Later that afternoon, when I walked past for a second time, the robins were still feasting but the tree was now almost berry-less.

With their high sugar content, berries are probably a kind of “junk food” to robins, which prefer a high-protein diet of insects, grubs and worms.

But just as a weary hiker can temporarily benefit by eating a candy bar, this sugary junk food probably offered these robins a quick shot of energy at a critical time.

On a related note, during a morning walk I took yesterday along a branch of the Root River, flocks of robins were exploiting the river’s edge like sandpipers, searching the only unfrozen ground available to them – the rocky shoals and mudflats at the river’s edge – for various macro-organisms.

No other bird is quite like North America’s most common and conspicuous thrush – so miraculous when they first arrive in March yet almost unremarkable as they hop across the lawn in May.