The Contradiction of Robins

In woods in mid-winter, living trees, shorn of leaves, join their dead companions in extending naked branches to the sky.  What was hidden in summer behind a green curtain is revealed.  The track along the edge of the pond near my home takes me to a point where, across the frozen surface, I now can see through the trees to where I started.  As a result, though the horizon has expanded in this season, this pond today seems much smaller.

In the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, this February has been bitterly cold and battleship gray with little hint that we are heading to spring.  Yet, the days are inexorably growing longer.  A full hour of sunlight will be gained between now and mid-March, though it won't feel that way amid the rain, the snow, the gray.

One of the contradictory phenomenon of winter throughout much of the central and eastern U.S., particularly at lower latitudes, is the bird we salute as the herald of spring, the American robin (Turdus migratotius).  Although it is actually with us through much, if not all, of this bleak season.  On my winter walks, robins have been my frequent companions, sometimes signaling their presence just by calling, and, sometimes, by swooping in large numbers onto the trees and bushes that still bear fruit (or, at least did, until the marauding robins descend).

I recently read Margaret Renkl's inspiring and graceful The Comfort of Crows:  A Backyard Year (2023).  Its essays track the passage of a year in the events and changes in the natural world, largely in Renkl's Nashville backyard.  The life and death, losses and gains, the comings and goings in that world move and educate her as she deals with changes in her own life, and responds to the chaos that has overtaken the country.  Ultimately, the persistence and resilience of the natural world offers her hope.  In nature, she remarks, "so much life springs from all this death that to spend time in the woods is also to contemplate immortality."  (p. 259)

What prompted me to write this post is a passage early in the book.  In a chapter set in winter, she cites a tradition among birders that the first bird seen in a new year will characterize the kind of year you will have.  One year, she spots a passing woodpecker but cannot determine if it is a downy or a hairy, so she goes with the second bird sighted, a robin.

I love robins. . . .  I love the way they flock up in winter, with the locals and their new offspring welcoming the migrators to a season-long family reunion.  (p. 5-6)

Renkl's portrayal of the local robins sharing their winter home with those migrating through pleased me, prompting research on the bird's migration patterns, including the relative balance between robin homebodies and travelers, and how far the latter actually migrate.

I admit that I've always found the robin's scientific genus name a bit off putting, in part because it evokes South Park.  But the Latin root for Turdus means "thrush" which the robin is, being a member of the thrush family Turdidae.  It's the species name that I think revealing because its dual meanings capture the bird's contradiction I just cited.  The Latin root of migratorius means both "migratory" and  "wandering."  Robins are restless creatures, they all wander, even those who seldom travel far from home.  Their search is constant for a supply of soft-bodied invertebrates in some months and fruit in others.

Populations of robins may be comprised of both migrants and year-round residents.  Indeed, this is possibly true of the majority of bird species.  For robins, this phenomenon has been explored by biologists David Brown and Gail Miller, using data on bird banding and recovery from 80 years of Federally supported bird banding.  They looked at robins in these data for which there were observations in both the breeding season (May to August) and the wintering season (November to February).  They defined individual, local/non-migrant robins as those for which the distance between locations of observations in breeding and wintering months was less than 100 km; all others were considered migrants.  (Band Recoveries Reveal Alternative Migration Strategies in American Robins, Animal Migration, Volume 3, 2016.)

Their findings document the overall complexity of the migratory behavior of T. migratorius.  Overall, they find 80 percent of recoveries to be migrants.  The distance traveled by migrants is stunning.  Of migrants, some 96 percent (nearly 77 percent of all robins) traveled 500 to 2,100 km from their breeding sites.  Curiously, the further south a migrant robin wintered, the further it had migrated.

A fifth or 20 percent of robins covered by their data stayed locally across breeding and wintering seasons, a phenomenon that has been increasing since 1980.  Overall, non-migrants moved on average slightly less than 21 km between these seasons.

A more detailed study of the movements of a small number of robins over a year suggests just how complicated migration can be for these birds, and how generalizations may fail to capture the reality.  Alex E. Jahn, et al. tagged 31 robins in the 2017 breeding season with devices that recorded their movements.  (First Tracking of Individual American Robins (Turdus migratorius) Across Seasons, The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Volume 131, Number 2, 2019.)  Although only 7 of the birds were recaptured in the 2018 breeding season, the journeys of these birds over the course of the year were fascinating, almost idiosyncratic.

Of the 11 tagged in Alaska, 4 were recaptured.  By the middle of September, these robins had left Alaska, flying into western Canada.  A month later, some had reached Montana and North Dakota.  One ultimately reached Texas, 4,480 km from where it originated; another migrated 4,508 km to Oklahoma.  Only one of the 14 birds tagged in Massachusetts was recaptured a year later.  That bird first lingered during the fall near its breeding grounds, only leaving Massachusetts in November.  Then, over the course of 20 days in early November, it winged its way to South Carolina, a distance of 1,210 km, where it overwintered.  Finally, of the five robins tagged in the District of Columbia, only two were recaptured and both stuck around their home territory for the entire year, migrating not at all.

The routes migrating robins follow during any particular journey south may not be fixed, possibly varying from year to year (bird to bird?).  The Cornell Lab's entry for the American Robin in Birds of the World, posits:

The term 'routes' does not really apply to robin migrations and there does not appear to be strong connectivity between overwintering and breeding grounds.  Indeed, evidence from banding records shows that robins in a particular area originate from widely scattered areas to the north.  (E. Natasha Vanderhoff, et al., American Robin, Birds of the World, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2020.)

Indeed, migrant status from year to year may not be immutable for individual robins.  Though Brown and Miller concede that their data do not allow them to determine whether any specific bird migrated one year but not the next, they add:  "It is possible, especially given the typically vagrant nature of robins during the non-breeding season."  (p. 43)  I am really taken with the idea that the impulse to migrate at all might be up for grabs for individual birds from year to year.

Ultimately, I believe that the robin's migratory behavior, bridging the seasons, offers some solace in this world where life inevitably leads to death.  Robins are heralds of restorative spring, the season when life is new and renewed, and, in the dark days of winter, they show that, even then, life persists.

The Color of November

 In the waning days of November, I cleared out a small area in my front yard.  Only then did I consider whether shrubs might be planted so close to the year’s end.  I thought that Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd might advise me, so I consulted their lyrical A Year at North Hill:  Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden (1996).  Landscapers Eck and Winterrowd were introduced in a post on asters nearly a decade ago.  In their chapter devoted to November, I found no inspiration about what to plant, possibly because that far up in the northern latitudes planting was now out of the question.  But I was inspired by Eck and Winterrowd’s characterization of November which prompted this post; I surround myself with a group of wonderful nature writers (and one cartoonist who is an expert on human nature) and see how their views of November might inform my own.  (Note:  Fossils don’t make an appearance in this post.)

I’ve come to appreciate that, here in the mid-Atlantic and further north, November is a special month, a transition month like no other in the calendar year.  The contrast between what came before and what the latter days of November offer is unique; we move from harvesting summer’s bounty and basking in October’s dramatic colors (the wash of reds, yellows, purples, and oranges in the deciduous trees as they mark the passing of their season of growth) to a time of hunkering down, living more in darkness than light, and often mourning an apparent loss of color in the landscape.  The change is quite abrupt and, for many, a depressing taste of a winter to come when a look back, around, and forward offers no relief.  Grayness has arrived.

That is, precisely, what Eck and Winterrowd write of November:

We could never say about this somber month that it is our favorite in the garden.  As the year winds down to its close, gray days occur with greater and greater frequency - not cloudy and not sunny, but simply gray.  Gray is also the predominant color of the garden and surrounding woods.  Most of the fiery splendor of October has fallen, revealing the great boles of trees and tanged architecture of deciduous shrubs, now an endless play on one monochromatic color.  (p. 125.)

So, for these Vermont gardeners, November equals gray.  (Though I must admit that perhaps in my area, hundreds of miles south of North Hill, late November may not be quite as gloomy.  That will emerge in a bit.)

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast agrees with Eck and Winterrowd.  Her cartoon titled November in the November 21, 2022, issue of the magazine features three shell-shocked individuals, typical denizens of her cartoons.  They are standing on a city sidewalk, mouths agape, hair in frizzy explosion, and arms nervously shaking.  They are clothed in well-worn jackets clearly guarding against the cold, and the scene around them is awash in gray.

The first person complains:  “It’s only 4:15, but it’s PITCH DARK!”

The second warns:  "Something is seriously amiss."

The third laments:  "It's the end of the world."

Now that is a truly dire, truly gray view of November, one brought on, of course, by the loss of daylight saving time.  But this month, even without that time change, would still be a period of shortening days and lengthening nights.  Darkness encroaching steadily.

Yet it’s not only this transformation from a time of abundance, light, and color to one of grayness that November effects. The month literally provides a degree of profound clarity to our landscape.  Writer Verlyn Klinkenborg, from the vantage point of his Vermont farm, captures that truth when he describes November as “this bare month.”  That he also shares my sense of the transition we’ve undergone is made plain when he adds:  “October’s memory seems a little lurid from the perspective of mid-November.”  (The Rural Life:  A Private Month, New York Times, November 19, 2006.)

But this is not the apocalypse, no matter what the Chast cartoon characters might think.  That clarity offers a chance to consider changes to your landscape.  Eck and Winterrowd write that November has days inviting one outside in the light of a “lowering sun,” “to evaluate plantings that show their structures better for having been stripped, and to make ambitious plans for the spring – what to move and what to order.”  (p. 126, 127.)

The opportunity to view your landscape, or just your garden, as a whole and consider its immediate and long-term future is an integral feature of November, something which triggers very different responses.  Planning for action in the spring helps with the transition from fall to winter, and seed catalogues are a tool of choice for this.  This is quite passive compared to a more robust embracing of that opportunity to chart the future of the land.  Consider what the visionary conservationist and ecologist, Aldo Leopold writes in his seminal book, A Sand County Almanac (1949), about this eleventh month of the year as it plays out on his 80-acre farm in the sand country of central Wisconsin:

November is, for many reasons, the month for the axe.  (p. 68.)

Yes, he, too, sees November as a month of opportunity with a focus on the trees that, with the loss of their leaves, stand in sharp relief, making it clear where their branches intersect and what the arc of their growth will be.  He writes, "Without this clear view of treetops, one cannot be sure which tree, if any needs felling for the good of the land."  (p. 68.)  Some will obstruct others, some will ultimately destroy others.  Given the finality of taking an axe to a tree, Leopold lays out at length how he passes sentence, exploring the various biases that may influence his decisions. Ultimately, he concludes, "The wielder of an axe has as many biases are there are species of trees on his farm."  (p. 70)  Thus, November to such a wielder of the axe in the landscape is a month of planning, foresight, and being, oh, so, deliberate in this action.

November also offers an invitation for a different kind of contemplation, for taking a moment from the rush of living to look broadly and closely at the natural world around us, not because we want to change things, but because we move beyond the boundaries of what we might control.  As he writes in A Year in the Maine Woods (1994), biologist and naturalist Bernd Heinrich deems November a month for stalking deer.  Yet, though he journeys through the month armed with a rifle, rarely is a shot fired, rather he spends his time hiking through the woods on and near his old Maine homestead and farm, or sitting high up in a tree.  All the while he’s observing the scene around him, registering the activities of the animals, particularly the birds (his books on birds are wonderful), studying the trees and plants that grace the woods.

My sense is that, by taking the opportunity in November for a close observation of nature, there comes a leavening of the Chastian dread that accompanies the month’s plunge into grayness.  The relief can be subtle, hardly dispelling the gloom, but still there nevertheless.  Heinrich captures it well.

From my perch in a tree, and walks to and from it I see the predominant gray and white tree trunks, and the kaleidoscopic pattern of browns from their fallen leaves.  It is a rare event indeed to see a deer on a deer watch, but until I do I enjoy seeing the woods – particularly the stunning display of mosses and lichens that are now an open book.  Before, when the canopy was green with leaves, and the ground was covered with herbs and small seedlings, these mosses did not stand out.  Now they shine with luminescent brilliance.  (p. 136.)

The month can have surprising color.  Some of that is reflected in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals.  She, the sister and an inspiration for poet William Wordsworth, is a sensitive observer of nature in the Lake District of England.  Her journals are fascinating, mixing accounts of the mundane – who’s visiting whom (poet Samuel Coleridge was a close friend), and who’s ill or recovering – with spellbinding passages describing the natural scene around her.  (Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 1971.)

Hers is a gentle view of nature, a positive, upbeat one.  At this time of the year, colors are there, though often quite muted.  I like the entry for Sunday, November 15, 1801.  The image she creates of a landscape seeming at rest is delightful (as are the place names).

I walked in the morning to Churnmilk Force nearly, and went upon Heifer crags.  The valley of its winter yellow, but the bed of the brook still in some places almost shaded with leaves – the oaks brown in general but one that might be almost called green – the whole prospect was very soft and the distant view down the vale very impressive, a long vale down to Ambleside – the hills at Ambleside in mist and sunshine – all else grey.  (p. 58.)

There’s the grayness but also some counterbalance to it.

I am taken by what she writes on Sunday, October 23, 1802, though it’s not an entry for November.  I think it merits quoting because she uses a word that so perfectly captures what is happening at this time of year.

It is a breathless grey day that leaves the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying, the lake is a perfect mirror.  (p. 162.)

Decaying, perhaps that’s the fundamental dynamic at work in how one might come to view the month.  This process starts in October, signaled by the burst of colors from the tree leaves, and continues deeply into November.  I wonder if it may be less the dullness of the encroaching grayness that worries us, but, rather, the subconscious recognition that this is a time of decay, things dropping away, breaking apart.

We are conditioned to view the month as monochromatic but, even when writers such as Wordsworth note the grayness, they punctuate their descriptions with notes of other hues.  I do think that, in this month, there is brightness and richness, if only you, like Heinrich, are open to it.  So, I went in search and found wonderfully sudden splashes of color adorning some of the paths down which I wandered.  Particularly striking are deep, robust blood reds.  Consider these seed clusters of sumacs (horn or smooth, I don’t know which) that I came upon in Brookside Gardens (a 54-acre site in the public park system of Montgomery County, Maryland):

Or the winterberry bushes outlined with their berries (also at Brookside):

Or the Christmassy palette of the St. John’s Wort in my own garden, capped by plump red berries:

Though November marks a fundamental transition from abundant growth to a time of decay, it offers more than just despairing grays.  It’s also a month of clarity, offering the chance of taking stock and looking forward.  It invites a closer look at the landscape and the chance to be moved by unexpected bursts of color.  There’s certainly enough here to keep one moving forward.

Monarchs and the Changing of the Season

I’ve been thinking about those events that mark the changing of the season from spring to summer here in the northern hemisphere.  I was prompted initially (in a decidedly negative fashion on my part as will be evident) by physicist Adam Frank’s oral essay titled Seeking the Solstice:  Kick Off Your Summer of Cosmic Sunsets that aired on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on June 19, 2014.  In it, Frank, who teaches at the University of Rochester and blogs for NPR, drew attention to the summer solstice which was to be reached in two days on the 21st.  He suggested that, to explore the “cosmic link between the solstice and the Earth’s seasons,” listeners should pick a place to watch the sun set over the course of the summer, somewhere with a fixed object on the horizon, and then observe how the spot at which the sun sets moves southward, relative to that fixed horizon point.  He noted that, had his listeners been tracking the sunset from the beginning of the year, they would have seen the sun appear to move north until, as we neared, reached, and passed the summer solstice, that northward movement would have slowed, ceased, and eventually reversed.  He suggested watching sunsets with your children and . . .

after a few weeks and you've watched the sunset's tack like sailboat through interplanetary winds, then you can be their science hero. Then you can recount to them the grand links between sunset, sunrise and seasons.

Wait.  Has he ever done anything with children?  Does he not know that one of the first, loudest, and ultimately most persistent question out of their mouths will be, “Why?  Why does this happen?”

Sadly, Frank’s little ad for families doing science together never even hints at an explanation of why the point of the sunset moves over time, never once mentions the tilt of the Earth’s axis which does explain the phenomenon, why we see what we see.

I was then struck by how, for me, the signal of the season change in this part of the year could never be the result of careful charting of the perceived movement of the sun (or sunset) or measurement of steadily lengthening or decreasing daylight.  The signal of when a corner has been turned, when a seasonal change has occurred, bringing a new perspective to the present year, is more visceral, less intellectual, less scientific (?) than that.  This year, I knew we had entered my summer when I became aware that the buds of a cluster of beebalm (Monarda didyma) in a corner of the garden had exploded with blossoms, blossoms like fireworks sending scarlet tracks arcing into the air:

and that the green pompoms of buds on the gangly common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) had opened into whitish pink flowers exuding a wonderful, arresting fragrance:

For me, these are moments that mark the change from spring to summer, not the end of sun’s march to the north.  Admittedly, my signals of the onset of summer are not the same every year.  Sometimes it’s when I'm told that a summer cottage, with its rusted hot water heater and aged roof, has become my destination.

This year, in addition to the flowers that sparked my sense of a seasonal change, there was another event – related to the opening of these flowers – and one that brought a bit of hope that a migratory miracle, a phenomenon that, in many ways, seems fated to slip into extinction, may not yet be doomed.  While out with the dog early on the 22nd of June, the first full day of summer, I came upon a stand of milkweed and, there, amid a ball of flowers, a monarch butterfly sipped nectar.  It was a fresh, female of the species (Danaus plexippus).

A member of the second generation born of the first generation which was spawned by that long-lived generation that overwintered in Mexico?  I would like to think so, but perhaps not, given that Maryland lies well outside the primary spring and summer breeding areas in what Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas, calls the “milkweed/monarch corridor.”  The generations of monarch that are conceived and born in this corridor are the primary ones participating in the monarch’s annual migratory phenomenon – the journey from their overwintering sites in Mexico to as far north as Canada and then back again.

This past winter saw the wooded area occupied by the overwintering monarchs in Mexico sink to the smallest recorded since the winter of 1994-95.  Rather than attempt the impossible (counting individual monarchs), a proxy measure is used – the area (in hectares) occupied by the overwintering monarchs.  It was 0.67 hectares (1.7 acres) in 2013-14, down from 7.81 hectares (19.3 acres) in 1994-95.  The peak recorded in this time period was in 1996-97 – 20.97 hectares (51.8 acres).  (Chip Taylor, Monarch Butterfly Recovery Plan.)  Chip Taylor attributes the downward trajectory in recent years to three primary factors:

1) the widespread adoption of herbicide tolerant corn and soybean varieties by North American farmers which has had the effect of eliminating milkweeds (the host plants for monarchs) within the crop fields; 2) the ethanol mandate passed by Congress in 2007 that increased the price of corn and soybeans which in turn led to the conversion of grasslands to crops thus [to the] elimination of the milkweeds that occurred in these areas, and 3) three consecutive years during which the reproductive success of the summer breeding population was limited by unfavorable weather conditions.  (Monarch Butterfly Recovery Plan.)

Taylor's Recovery Plan is a hopeful document, offering some concrete steps that can be taken to help mitigate those factors we can influence.  The President's recent Executive Memorandum, Presidential Memorandum -- Creating a Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators (The White House, June 20, 2014), suggests there will be some much-needed attention in high places to the fate of the monarch (sadly, not included in the memorandum's title but lumped in with "Other Pollinators").

On the Annenberg Foundation’s student-centered website Journey North, the actual movement of the monarchs north from Mexico to their spring and summer breeding grounds can be tracked.  The dots on the map are color-coded to reflect the sightings of first monarchs in discrete time periods from the late winter through to summer.  Pressing the “animated map” button at the bottom of the map does just that, bringing the data to life as we watch the timing and extent of the spread northward.

These data gathered in this website by citizen scientists do not tell us anything about numbers of butterflies.  To know whether numbers have rebounded at all, or continued their spiral downward, we’ll have to wait until the hectares in Mexico covered by the overwintering monarchs can be counted during the winter.  Those specific monarchs are the super-generation, the one that makes the long haul in the fall to Mexico, spends the winter there, and then moves north to give birth to a new generation in the spring and to one of the most beautiful and fragile signals of season change of all.