Do Daddy Robins Feed The Chicks?
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What observation did Sean Murray make about Daddy Robins?
This is Mooney Goes Wild on RTE Radio 1.
Robins.
Good morning Derek and good morning to all your listeners in this beautiful world of nature we have. I thought I'd like to share a magnificent sighting I had the other day while out in my garden. I was sitting down by my table and I spotted five little birds on my fence. On the left mummy robin, three little baby robin chicks and on the right was daddy robin and what I saw really astounded me. Both mummy robin and daddy robin were feeding the chicks with worms from my garden. What I thought was really unusual was that daddy bird was feeding the chicks as well. Is this normal or is this something new? That's my view. It was absolutely thrilling to see it.
Yes, Derek, of course the male does help. He does feed the babies. In the robin world, the robins, they have a division of labour, but the female does all the incubating. She sits on the eggs, she lays the eggs, of course, and she sits on them. He doesn't help out there. But once the babies arrive, he feeds them and she feeds them. Now, in Ireland, they normally produce two broods. You see, after about a fortnight, the youngsters are gone. And a few weeks after that, they're fledged. Now, before they fledge, she's starting to lay her next clutch. And he then takes over to feed the babies on the first clutch of babies on his own, more or less. So they're very cooperative. But at the end of the season, however, they go their separate ways.
They're not... lovey-dovey throughout the year. They're only lovey-dovey through the breeding season.
Yeah, it's true. Especially when you see then Christmas cards and you see two or three robins on them together. That does not happen. The only time I ever see robins together is during the breeding season and I see them in the back garden because they nest regularly in the back garden. And like Richard says, they have... Generally, in my garden, about three clutches. And I know it is said that they build a new nest and they move on to new nests. But there's one particular small robin nest box in the garden, down the bottom of the garden. And they use that religiously. They're in it again. And like Richard said as well, too, as soon as that first clutch leaves the nest... He tends to stay with them. So it's only him that I will see in the garden feeding.
She's gone off and she's starting on a second family. The other thing about them as well, people often say to me, oh, look at the robin there and he's feeding a thrush or something. Because when you look at the small birds, when they come out of the nest. When they come out of the nest, they don't look like robins. They look like small trushes, a ball of fluff, as big as the mammy or the daddy. Sometimes they even look bigger, but the breast is speckled. And the reason for that is they can't have that red breast because if they had that red breast, both the mammy and daddy would attack them. But the mam and the dad are feeding them? Absolutely, yes.
Oh, they are. And the daddy is a rather aggressive little fellow, you know. He doesn't tolerate other robins around at all. Why should he? Well, other birds are less dogmatic about it. But he is very... Without a ball of fluff or something, if it's red, he's likely to attack it as well.
They're not very social birds. If you think another small bird that you'd have in the garden, say the blue tit. The blue tits are much more social than the robins. And a good example of that was back in the 1930s or so when blue tits in Southampton in England... They discovered this trick of going to milk bottles, they used to have milk bottles in those days, and they could peck open the top of the cap. The foil cap. The foil cap, yeah. And they were doing that to get at the cream. It's not milk that's in the bottle, it's milk, full milk. But at the top of the full milk, there's cream. They can't drink the milk themselves because they're lactose intolerant. It makes them very, very sick. But they can take the cream.
So they're getting all the fat from the cream. the nutrition from the fat.
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