The weirdest things happen in my yard. Or maybe they happen in everyone’s yard and I just pay better attention. Really, who expects to find a lost carrier pigeon in their backyard? Or a partially-albino Junco? And I clearly have the lock on demented squirrels (here and here and here just for starters).
I’ve had crows dunk waffles and English muffins in my birdbaths, raccoons screaming bloody murder as they try to kill one another in the middle of the night, and once I even witnessed a swarm of bees swirl in the sky above my yard like a tornado and land by the thousands on a branch of my apple tree. Not many people get to witness that spectacle.
My latest oddballs are a pair of robins. I’ve lived in this house almost 20 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times a robin has landed in my yard to search for insects. Oh, I know they are ubiquitous, but they’ve never preferred the oak canopy that surrounds our neighborhood.
First of all, what kind of robin redbreast is this? At first I thought it was a molting issue, but that’s a really big patch of black on his breast. It looks like he’s wearing an ascot:
It hasn’t affected his ability to find a mate. Here’s his wife:
What’s strange about these two is that they like to visit my birdfeeder. I’ve been birdwatching for decades, and I’ve never seen a robin eat from a feeder before.
Both of them seem rather uncomfortable at the feeder. Robin blackbreast grabs his morsels and wolfs them down. Then he flies below the feeder and waits for the Mourning Doves to fling more food to the ground:
The missus is in an even bigger hurry. She grabs a piece of dried fruit as quickly as she can and flies to one of my flowerbeds where she flings it on the ground before picking it up again and swallowing it whole:
As I was typing this, two more pairs of robins landed in my yard, and males that were clearly NOT robin blackbreast flew to the feeder and started eating.
Clearly I have an epidemic of eccentric robins on my hands.