To Everything There is a Season ...?
Everywhere I go of late, people have been stopping me to talk about the robins. They seem to be everywhere (the robins, I mean), in numbers that even experienced birders and naturalists do not recall. And they are not acting as winter robins normally do. Most falls, robins migrate; it is rare in such years to see them beyond late October. In years of large wild berry crops, primarily Mountain ash (Roundtops, or "les cormiers" as they are often called locally), though, robins will stick around, usually in small numbers. If you happen to have a clump of mountain ash nearby, you might see them flitting out from shelter to feed; they then retreat to the dense spruce or cedar thickets to conserve energy against the prevailing cold. Often, they will go undetected unless one happens to wander into such a thicket and spot them.
However, it has been a different story thus far this winter. To begin with, there was a very heavy crop of the berries this fall, which encouraged large numbers of robins to hang around. Then the persistent mild weather has given them very little reason either to move, or to skulk around in the thickets; they simply have not needed to be overly concerned with either heavy snow or biting winds. And so we see them acting very much as we expect them to when they first come back here in April after a winter further south. They are foraging actively, they are socializing, even singing (although not their territorial songs), and they seem perfectly content to wait things out.
And it is not only the robins who have benefited from this break in winter patterns. I am consistently seeing flocks of Cedar waxwings, another species that flourishes on the Mountain ash, but who usually vacate the premises in late fall. Conversely, their close relatives, Bohemian waxwings, who usually put in an appearance in winters of heavy berry crops, have not done so yet this year. I surmise that that is simply because the abundant berry crop extends across the country into northern Ontario, and Bohemians, birds of the west who tend to migrate east, rather than south, in winter have not yet had the need to come this far in search of food. There are also good numbers of American goldfinches around - less conspicuously than in summer because the males do not have their brilliant yellow and black plumages, but rather the pal. olive-yellow of the females and young birds. Goldfinches have been the beneficiaries of the scant snow; they are not much interested in the Mountain ash berries; instead they are feeding on the seeds of grasses and small trees that normally are buried by now. I expect them to vanish immediately after the first heavy snows of the winter, if they ever come.
I gather that the same conditions - abundant food, mild temperatures, and little snow cover - explains why we are not seeing many of the expected birds of winter - no redpolls, very few juncos, tree sparrows or other small visitors from further north who so often frequent our feeders at this time of year. All of this demonstrates two things: one of them is that many birds only migrate as necessity dictates, rather than according to a set pattern of movement; the other is that , thus far, this has truly been a remarkable winter.
