A Robin's Nest, from Twelve Months with the Birds and Poets

MP3 Audio CD. A Robin's Nest, from Twelve Months with the Birds and Poets (in LibriVox 12th Anniversary Collection )

Twelve Months. With employ mud in their nest building, frequently wait a day or two after the nest is finished before laying their eggs, which action might be attributed to instinctive solicitude for the future family, but this practice is not peculiar to birds who use mud in their nests, so that the delay is more likely due in each case to the fact that the egg is not mature. Mr. Burroughs relates a story of a creeping warbler whose egg became ripe before the nest was finished. After excavating the site for the nest, the bird laid the egg, and then finished the nest over it. So that if instinct sometimes errs upon the one side and fails to prompt the bird to build its nest in time, it may easily err on the other side and urge nest building too soon. But, to return to our nest on the window ledge-whatever the reason may have been for her four days' absence, at the expiration of that time the female robin returned to the nest, and then laid one egg a day until four were in the nest, and as I write she is faithfully warming the nest and its eggs, and clamorously protesting when any one appears at the window, or at any window in the vicinity. This experience of the robin's nest on the win- dow ledge reminds me of Wordsworth's lines on the robin at his casement window: “Stay, little cheerful Robinl stay, And at my casement sing, Though it should prove a farewell lay And this our parting spring.”

The Birds and Poets 17 Lowell, in his beautiful lines “To the Dande- lion,” recalls the robin of his childhood: “The sight of thee calls back the robin's song, Who from the dark old tree Beside the door sang clearly all day long, And I, secure in childish piety, Listened as if I heard an angel sing With news from heaven, which he could bring Fresh every day to my untainted ears When birds and flowers and I were h