Young Robins In The Hood
Wednesday morning as I was packing for North Dakota, I could hear a young robin in the neighborhood, begging for food. Throughout the morning it was figuring out this whole flight thing and getting fed large grubby looking things by its parents.
About a half an hour before I left, the young robing had found the puddle on the apartment building across the ally--the same one that hosted a Cooper's hawk last spring. I managed to get a couple of videos. Here is the young robin taking his first dips (you might hear a red-eyed vireo singing outside my window):Here a second video with a rock pigeon joining and scaring the young robin...and that is the BarryTones doing HipShop in the background (a barbershop quartet singing a medley of popular hip hop songs):
Labels: Apartment Roof Bath, digiscoping, digivideo
posted by birdchick at 1:46 PM
8 Comments:
I love the speckled chest of the young robin- videos & pics just awesome!
Cute! :)
That's no robin, that's a thrush. But then again, residents of a country with species named black-faced cuckoo-shrike and chestnut-breasted quail-thrush, both of which have no relation to cuckoos, shrikes, quails or thrushes, should keep quiet about such trivia.
I really enjoyed the film clips. Interesting to see how the pigeon drinks by pumping motion of its throat, while the robin can only dip and scoop.
twitchgirl-
No, it's a robin. Robins *are* thrushes, and when they're young, they still have spots.
If you were joking, I missed it because I'm dumb ;)
-kcanadensis
Of course I was joking. I know it is called a robin. I was simply referring to the interesting choices people sometimes make when naming birds. For instance, we have this cute little duck in Australia with conspicuous zebra-striping all over and a tiny, tiny pinkish spot next to its ear. So what do we call it? Exactly, the pink-eared duck. Sigh.. :-)
But yes, the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is of course a member of the Thrush family or Turdidae. See Cornell Lab of Ornithology which litterally calls it a large thrush. Like most other thrushes it is a ground forager and eats worms and things.
"Robin" is a name often reserved for small insectivorious birds foraging at least one meter above the ground (all kinds of different families world wide). However, the birds named "robin" worldwide are a mottled crew. All, however, are members of the order Passeriformes. But then, so are crows and ravens :-)
European robin (Erithacus rubecula) is a member of the family Muscicapdiae (fly-cathers) while the Australian and New Zealand robins belong to the family Petroicidae.
But yes, none of that really matters of course. Species must have common names so we don't sound like complete nerds when we say we are off to feed the Anatidae in the park ;-)
But then, things get complicated, because... I just learned this... American bird books for the Australian continent make up their own names for Australian species. Now if we would speak different languages I could understand but this... I'm puzzled. Thank Linnaeus for Latin.
I need a break... watching the Cacatuidae wreak havoc on the Proteaceous shrubs outside my window. While some Meliphagidae get all worked up over nothing.
May that rooftop never ever get fixed.
: )
That pigeon looks like a giant compared to the robin. When my mom takes me for walks, I will sit and watch bird for a full 2 minutes. I like them!!
Hugs, Kodak
Wow, that pigeon is actually really pretty and healthy looking! All the pigeons I see in my city are all sickly and haggard and just make you cringe.
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