Here’s a lovely three-minute video filmed by someone whose hanging plant basket became the site of a robin’s nest. It shows the complete development of her brood of four. The mother’s expression at the end when she returns with a worm, only to find that her final chick has flown the nest, is sad but priceless.
h/t: Moto
So very gorgeous. Thanks.
She literally drops her jaw! (Yeah, yeah I know NOT literally since she has a beak, and not a …)
What a beautiful little tribute to these birds. I doubt I’d have been able to go to work or get out of the house at all, if there was a nest like this to keep watching.
Great to see a video, coz just this spring I was pleasantly surprised to see a robin’s nest outside my window, but it was a bit late in the schedule, the chicks were quite grown, and barely fitting in the nest, and were dying to grab food from parents. The activity was sometimes too fast for the human eye to follow, and I wished I could film it in high speed.. but I managed to observe the following.
1) of course the chicks seem to want food all the time. The parents dont seem to devote equal time to feeding the chicks. One was the parents was much larger than the other, and would make much fewer trips to the nest to feed the young.
2) how does a parent distribute food amongst the young? does it remember who it fed last and do some kind of round-robin? nope.. Each time it brings some food, it appears as if it gives the food to the first chick that reaches for the food.
3) waste disposal: This is funny.. the chicks generate “white-stuff” from the back when prodded by the parent, and the parent takes it in its beak and off it goes to dispose it elsewhere. I had seen this before in some David Attenborough program, and so readily made sense of it.
I don’t know about robins, but in some bird species the inside of the mouth of the most recent one fed changes color and so the chick with the reddest mouth gets fed next. L
I feel like I’ve read somewhere that each chick basically tries to obtain all the food from its parents that it can, through chirping and reaching out and muscling out its siblings. Naturally, some don’t get enough food, and starve.
Assuming it isn’t always possible for a bird to find enough food for its entire brood, a mutation that made a chick compete with its nestmates would quickly spread throughout the population, since those would be the chicks that survive.
Thanks for the link, Jerry!
Appropriate for this time of year – a lot of human offspring will be flitting the nest in a few days, off to university.
Oh, now, they’re not really gone. We watch a couple of broods of robins every summer and, believe me, those babes will be following their parents around for quite a while, pestering them for food.
Oh, Lars, just saw your comment. Sounds about right, no?
Yes, I suppose. Going off to U is the first step, though.
A really neat video, but there’s something genuinely creepy about all those reaching, gawping, greedy little beaks. Those little buggers would happily eat us if the scales were reversed.
I wish some of my chicks would learn to fly. Oh well, in time I suppose. Lovely video. I wonder if she’ll be back next year?
That was a lovely video. I once raised a brood of robin chicks. They were demanding.
About the human chicks being off: my niece, raised fundementalist, is off to public university–as a Biology major! I told her that when she starts to hear things that go against the lies she’s learned that she should listen carefully. She’s had apologetics classes so I don’t know how or if she’ll use that. I did finally get a chance to explain what a scientific theory was–she hadn’t heard that before.
Maybe she’ll do well.
Actually, mom’s “worms” had been rubber replicas for quite a while now; she’d been hoping the young ‘uns would get the message. After all, Robina and Robert Robin in the next basket had dispatched their brood a couple weeks ago, and had already left for Florida.
Beautifully put together video – I loved the clips with the rain, and both parents together.