Week 11: American Robin, Emily Dickinson, Robert Ridgway

Headnote#

Last week were the first morning bird songs that I have noticed, riding quietly in the car with my partner after dropping our kids at school. I didn’t know it at the time, but that bright morning lay roughly equidistant between the final blizzard of the winter (a nor’easter, as they call it) and a season finale of delicate snow turned into freezing rain. In this way, the cold and warmth, dark and light, liberations and rainy constraints of spring organize this month, as we “interrupt” and “overflow” the patterns of winter yet linger in the “Certainty / And Sanctity” of our hibernations. This transitional season contains a multitude of emotions, as evoked by Dickinson’s other poems featuring Robins (see More below).

The American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is a “true thrush” (genus Turdus) within the general “thrush” (Turdidae) family. Thrushes are passerine, or perching, birds within the order Passeriformes, a highly diverse clade comprising approximately half of the world’s bird species. The American Robin is a migratory bird, unlike its smaller, orange-breasted namesake, the European Robin (Erithacus rubecula), which is classified in the wonderfully named “Old World flycatcher” family (Muscicapidae).

Fig. 1. Species migration map for American Robins, March 5-12, created using the National Audubon Society’s Bird Migration Explorer. See video below for full-year visualization.

Readings#

1. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

   The Robin is the One That interrupt the Morn With hurried – few – express Reports When March is scarcely on –

   The Robin is the One That overflow the Noon With her cherubic quantity – An April but begun –

   The Robin is the One That speechless from her Nest Submit that Home – and Certainty And Sanctity, are best

Emily Dickinson, “The Robin is the One” (cir. 1863, pub. 1891).

Fig. 2. 1863 manuscript of “The Robin is the One,” Amherst College, collected in Emily Dickinson Archive.

Slender-billed or small-billed, ten-primaried acutiplantar Oscines, having the acrotarsium undivided or “booted,” except for lower portion, and the young in first plumage more or less distinctly spotted above as well as below, even in species which are unspotted in the adult stage. […]

The Turdidae comprise a great variety of forms which, though all possessing the characters given above as diagnostic of the group, present wide differences in general appearance, form and coloration, and habits. They may be arboreal, terrestrial, or saxicoline; frugivorous or insectivorous—though many kinds feed both upon fruits and berries and insects; plainly colored or of brilliant hues, though the latter is exceptional, the former being the rule. The family is remarkable for the number of excellent songsters which it contains, several of them, as the Nightingale, the Song Thrush, and the Blackbird (Planesticus merula) being renowned in this respect, while the American Wood Thrushes (genus Hylocichla) and some of the Nightingale Thrushes (genus Catharus) and Solitaires (genus Myadestes) are scarcely less remarkable for the quality of their melody. The Turdidae, as a group, are nearly cosmopolitan, only parts of Polynesia being without representatives. They are most numerously represented in the extensive area of the Palearctic Region, which possesses many peculiar genera; but the family is well developed in America, especially in the mountainous districts extending from Mexico to the central Andes, the total number of species and subspecies now known to occur in America being about one hundred and fifty, belonging to nineteen genera.”

Robert Ridgway, “Family Turdidae. The Thrushes,” from The Birds of North and Middle America: A Descriptive Catalog, The Smithsonian Institution (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907), pp. 1-4.

Fig. 3. “The Redbreast,” or European Robin, from Howard Saunders (1835-1907), An Illustrated Manual of British Birds (London: Gurney and Jackson, 1889), p. 37.

More#

• Poetry

  • Emily Dickinson, “I have a bird in spring” (1854).

  • Emily Dickinson,“I dreaded that first Robin, so,” (1862, pub. 1891).

  • Emily Dickinson, “How dare the robins sing,” (n.d.).

  • Witter Bynner, “The Robin” (1907).

  • Paul Adrian, “Robin in Flight” (2010).

• Ornithology

  • Sarah Fecht, “American Robins Now Migrate 12 Days Earlier than in 1994” (April 1, 2020), from State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School.

  • Migration Dashboard, from Cornell BirdCast

  • “American Robin,” from Audubon Society Field Guide.

Video: Annual Migration Patterns of American Robins