The Robin Project :

There's a robin's nest in our big holly tree. I have not so much SEEN it as heard it. The parents were really making a big hubbub this morning when I was weeding back there-- and I could hear the reason why. There were small peeping whispers coming from the crook in the tree where the nest is sitting.

Robins like to nest where they can see all around and can fly up and away if necessary. We like them so much we have studied how to build a robin nesting perch so we can watch them nearer the house. Once we get our patio finished we will try to get a family of robins to live near us.

Robins remind me of my father. He brought a little naked creature in from where it had fallen near his lawnmower path. This was sometime in the fifties, I guess, because I remember coming home from a summer job and that little robin would know when I came in the back door. He would answer when I would make a baby robin kind of peep with my tongue against my teeth. Dad had a friend at work who had once brought up a robin and had a cage and other gear. Dad brought it all home and we set up Peety. He got to get out of his cage and hop around the living room when I was there, and used to perch on my shoulder, and ask for a handout. We gave him raw hamburger. He and I got close over the early summer weeks, and then began forays out into the back yard. He would ride on my shoulder and I would set him on low branches so he would "know he was a robin." He could hop off the branch back onto my finger safely enough. But then came the day when he tried to fly. It did not work. He broke his neck! Who knows which of the things I had done to prepare him for robinhood (pun unintended) did him in. Maybe hamburger was wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have put him on a tree branch. Maybe, in fact, he was not a well bird to begin with. But whatever the case I was crushed and grief stricken. He was laid to rest, and the cage was returned to my father's friend.

All of this gets revived in my memory when it comes to robins-- and I count again my good fortune in having a father that thought it was a good idea to do a robin project. Such a lot of learning happened around that project. And my father really knew it would. He was good. Sure he was imperfect, but really really a good father.

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