February 14, 2010

The first robin


I'd only been awake for a few minutes and needed to rub my eyes a few times to believe what I was seeing. But there he was: A big fat robin, perched in my lilac bush, waiting with the sparrows for me to fill the bird feeder.

I grabbed my camera and got the best photo I could – not great, but proof that this harbinger of spring really was really paying a visit on Valentine's Day.

I couldn't recall ever seeing a robin with this much snow on the ground.

Surely the worms are still buried deep in the ground, far beyond the reaches of this brave fellow. So I did a Google search to see when robins normally reach the Larchmont area and found an interesting website that tracks sightings of birds. I posted my sighting and found that robins had been sighted on Long Island earlier this week.

I'm hoping this means the groundhogs were wrong.

1 comment:

  1. I know the thrill of a robin siting...I was sitting in yet another traffic jam earlier this weekend and heard a flurry of birdsong coming from a huge old american holly. As I watched, the tree exploded with activity and what to my surprise - it was all robins. I suppose they were feasting on the brilliant red berries in lieu of the worms they usually pluck, now stuck 60,000 fathoms under the snow!

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