Harriet & Charles Raise A Family

Harriet and Charles are our resident robins. For weeks they had been trying to build a nest on the window trim on every single window of the house. They started on my office window. I noticed it when, out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of bits of dried grass constantly floating down from somewhere above. I finally stepped outside to see what was going on and found a very frustrated robin going through the motions of gathering dried grass and string for a nest, only to see it drift downward when the slightest breeze came up. This was becoming a drama we couldn't help but follow so I named our uninvited house guests Harriet and Charles.

Harriet tried the dining room as well as windows at the rear of the house only to meet the same futile result. Then, coming around the side of the house on the far side of where she had begun, she really set her mind to it. We watched her progress & kept shaking our heads as stacks of dried grass piled up underneath the ledge where she'd decided to build. But this time nothing discouraged her. It was going to be THERE and that was all there was to it! Each spring for the past 3 years we've seen robins attempting the same futile task, but of course we don't know if Harriet was "it" or one of several. In any case she finally succeeded. And the truth was, it was rather ingenious because it was nearly invulnerable and invisible from a bird's eye view. Branches from nearby trees hung over the roof in that area, but not close enough for predators to attack from above, nor could they crawl up from below.

She settled, she laid her eggs, she incubated them for 2 weeks, then one morning we saw 3 small beaks sticking up from inside the nest. A few days later they had grown enormously and started perching on the edge of the nest, waiting for Harriet to feed them. She finally got a little impatient and pushed the biggest one off. He fluttered to the ground, peeping and hopping around, finally finding his way around the side of the house to the edge of our bank overlooking the sound, and then over.

David was concerned and tried to reach the poor thing, but Harriet seemed to oversee it and the 2 others who followed soon after. David was highly critical of what he considered the cavalier treatment she gave them and sure the little ones were doomed. They disappeared for a few days, but one evening I looked out at a patch of new grass that David was watering and saw a family of robins looking for worms, the speckled breasted ones waiting expectantly to be fed by the adults. It looked as though they had all survived--at least for now. According to an article I found in Wikipedia, only 25% of young robins survive the first year.