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William Palmer on David Lack, The Life of the Robin, SF 76, Jill Meager

The Sweetest Note of All Others

Most of the houses of East Sheen in south-west London were built on farmland as part of the great explosion of suburbia between the 1890s and 1930s. The houses are solid and the rear gardens long. There are ancient copses in nearby Richmond Park and the surround­ing patches of common land but most of the garden trees were planted by the first residents and have grown over the years to maturity, just as the hedges of hawthorn and privet have grown taller and thicker. Patient gardening turns the soil and throws up worms and hundreds of other varieties of insect. A consequence of all this activ­ity is that, with the destruction of wild woodland and the poisoning of farmland by chemical fertilizers, perhaps the safest place for wild birds is now a leafy suburb – apart, that is, from the large number of cats, sitting with deadly patience under hedges and in long grass, but I’ll come back to them.

Certainly our garden in East Sheen is visited by blackbirds, gold­finches, jays, crows, magpies, wood pigeons, London pigeons, hedge sparrows, blue tits, coal tits and the bright green parakeets that fan out from Richmond Park. (The first parakeets were allegedly brought from Africa to Shepperton Studios to add colour to studio-shot scenes of the film The African Queen: some escaped and have bred in the park ever since.) Most birds will feed in the trees or on the ground in our garden, but when a human emerges from the house they immediately fly off to what they judge is a safer distance. The only bird that holds its ground or merely flits away to a nearby hedge to observe us is the robin.

Over the past twenty years we have had several generations of robins nesting in our garden. We grew fond of one in particular. I shall call him ‘he’ because he did seem to perform the male duty of getting food and taking it back to the nest. The peculiarity of this bird was that he had only one leg. That is to say that he only ever used one leg, the left, to al

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Most of the houses of East Sheen in south-west London were built on farmland as part of the great explosion of suburbia between the 1890s and 1930s. The houses are solid and the rear gardens long. There are ancient copses in nearby Richmond Park and the surround­ing patches of common land but most of the garden trees were planted by the first residents and have grown over the years to maturity, just as the hedges of hawthorn and privet have grown taller and thicker. Patient gardening turns the soil and throws up worms and hundreds of other varieties of insect. A consequence of all this activ­ity is that, with the destruction of wild woodland and the poisoning of farmland by chemical fertilizers, perhaps the safest place for wild birds is now a leafy suburb – apart, that is, from the large number of cats, sitting with deadly patience under hedges and in long grass, but I’ll come back to them.

Certainly our garden in East Sheen is visited by blackbirds, gold­finches, jays, crows, magpies, wood pigeons, London pigeons, hedge sparrows, blue tits, coal tits and the bright green parakeets that fan out from Richmond Park. (The first parakeets were allegedly brought from Africa to Shepperton Studios to add colour to studio-shot scenes of the film The African Queen: some escaped and have bred in the park ever since.) Most birds will feed in the trees or on the ground in our garden, but when a human emerges from the house they immediately fly off to what they judge is a safer distance. The only bird that holds its ground or merely flits away to a nearby hedge to observe us is the robin. Over the past twenty years we have had several generations of robins nesting in our garden. We grew fond of one in particular. I shall call him ‘he’ because he did seem to perform the male duty of getting food and taking it back to the nest. The peculiarity of this bird was that he had only one leg. That is to say that he only ever used one leg, the left, to alight on the ground or on the fence, or to hop about. He did have a right leg, but it seemed permanently bent into his side. To try and shed some light on this I hunted through my shelves for an old Pelican book called The Life of the Robin, by David Lack. Though it contains only one reference to robins who sometimes perch on one leg (and makes no mention of any who were never seen to use the other), I became engrossed. The book had been too long in that large category of books consulted in some way but never actually read all the way through. I’m very glad I did with this one. The Life of the Robin was first published in 1943, and a revised edition followed in 1953. It is one of the few Pelicans of that time whose chaste blue and white cover has a splash of another colour – the red breast of the robin. It was intended as a serious study, based on Lack’s four years of observing robins at Dartington in South Devon before the Second World War, but it was written primarily for the non-scientific bird-lover, and was concerned with the real life of the robin, ‘which may be found more curious than the legends’. Not that Lack ignored the legends and the representation of robins in literature; in 1950 he followed his study with Robin Redbreast, a won­derful anthology of the bird’s appearances in folklore, poetry and children’s literature over the centuries. The most abiding countryside legend has always been that the wife of the cock robin is the smaller wren, little Jenny Wren – a mistake easily made, as the two species often live in close proximity, but in fact the male and female robin appear indistinguishable. Lack first sexed his birds largely by their behavioural patterns: because robins are unusually trusting, he was able to trap, ring and release over a hundred birds with a combination of coloured rings so that he could easily identify any single bird of either sex. Over the years he mapped out their patterns and rituals. Like most creatures, a robin’s life involves the challenges of survival when young, forming a partnership, establishing a home and territory where food can be gathered and, above all, fighting in defence of its ground. A male robin seeking to enter another’s territory will quickly be met at the boundary and the two birds will engage in a contest of loud song and dramatic posturing with much display of their red breasts – rather like two rival tenors at La Scala. Except for very young aggressive robins, it is rare for such displays to result in actual physical combat. Usually the would-be usurper is seen off and slinks away to sing rather forlornly from a distance, while the victor sings loudly in tri­umph. Lack points out sardonically that ‘it is rare indeed in intelligent man that a territorial dispute is settled bloodlessly’. Man’s use on the battlefield of musical aggression in the form of drums, pipes and martial songs usually results in mass bloodshed; the robin’s melliflu­ous song results in our pleasure. As Goldsmith said, of all British birds ‘it has the sweetest note of all others’. Why we take particular pleasure in the songs of the robin is still rather mysterious. After all, most noises birds make are rudimentary calls of alarm or aggression, such as the repetitive chants of the seagull. It is easy to anthropomorphize the actions of animals we like, but the songs of robins are often more individually recognizable and more musically complex than would seem necessary for their simple purposes. Victorious in battle, the robin sings long and loud; but on first acquiring his own territory his song is also a way of advertising his availability as a mate. It is the hen birds who seek out their mates, rather than the other way about. Sadly, cock birds tend to sing a great deal less after pairing up and hen birds sing hardly at all. It sounds like many a suburban marriage. After the birds have paired, the breeding season starts in early spring. Cup-shaped nests are constructed by the female from moss and leaves and usually concealed in a crevice or a hollow in the ground, but they can be built in some very odd places: ‘a jam-jar, an old boot, a pulpit, a human skull . . . a gardener hung up his coat in the tool shed at 9.15 a.m., and when he took it down to go off to lunch at 1 p.m. there was an almost complete robin’s nest in one of the pockets’. The case of the nest in the skull echoes the old country legend that robins cover the dead with leaves. This seems to have originated in the sixteenth century but may be much older. Early graveyards were often not kept in good order and it may have been the sight of robins flitting down to examine freshly turned earth that started the belief that they were somehow attending to the dead. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare has the ‘ruddock’ bring down flowers to sweeten the grave of Imogen, and ‘furred moss besides, when flowers are none,/ To winter-ground thy corpse’. The full glory of the legend is seen in the ballad ‘The Children in the Wood’ by that great poet Anon., which first appeared in the late seventeenth century. A young girl and boy are wickedly abandoned in a wood:

Thus wandered these poor innocents, Till death did end their grief; In one another’s arms they died, As wanting due relief: No burial this pretty pair From any man receives, Till robin redbreast piously Did cover them with leaves.

As Lack points out, in much later Christmas pantomime versions of The Babes in the Wood, the children are of course rescued by none other than Robin Hood. Indeed, it’s at Christmas that the robin comes into his own with his appearance on millions of greetings cards. On early Victorian cards a robin is often seen holding a letter in its beak or lifting the knocker on a front door, and on one card the heading above the robin is ‘The Little General Postman’. And ‘Robin’ had by the 1850s become a common nickname for postmen since they wore a bright red coat as part of their uniform. In Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861), Jemima the cook calls out in welcome, ‘Come in Robin post­man, and warm theeself awhile.’ When reading the legends and poetry – by Skelton, Herrick, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Clare, among many others – that celebrate the beauty of the bird’s song, its plucky bearing and seem­ing fondness for human company, it is easy to forget that the life of these birds has always been precarious. When young robins hatch in spring, and their parents then feed them for a few weeks, what are their future life prospects? For most, very poor. Lack calculated that ‘57 per cent of the eggs in completed clutches gave rise to young which successfully left the nest’. Of these young birds only 23 per cent survived until they could themselves breed. The average age of the robin is only a little over a year. But, still, as in country churchyards where there are always a few tomb­stones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recording people of great age, in a time of high mortality among infants, so too there are robins who live for twelve years. And they do live a great deal faster than humans. Anyone who has held a robin in the hand will be astonished by the strength of its beating heart: as Lack found, their pulse rate is over 900 beats a minute, so that ‘an 11-year-old robin is equivalent to a man 150 years old’. The robin lives in easy accommodation with us and can become a little spoiled: ‘several tamers of robins have noted the bird’s fondness for butter. Three which regularly took butter would not take margarine.’ The birds cling still closer to human dwellings in hard winters when food is scarce. This unfortunately brings them into contact with their prize enemy – the domestic cat. Of 110 deaths of robins examined in Lack’s book, cats were responsible for 44. I suspect that proportion is even higher in the suburbs. Fortunately, though, in the past few centuries the British have been too fond of their robins to wantonly kill, let alone cook and eat them. I don’t know if the French still eat small songbirds, but they certainly did so in the last century. In 1916 a French ornithologist observed that ‘in the district of Le Var, round Toulon, the robins destroyed in one season totalled 20,000’. As William Blake wrote:

The Robin and the Wren Are God Almighty’s Cock and Hen, Him that Harries their nest Never shall his soul have rest.

And our own robin with one usable leg? We enjoyed seeing him in the garden for almost three years, but he has not been seen at all for almost a year now. I suspect foul play by a black-and-white cat that hangs about our garden; no doubt greatly loved in his own house, but not in ours.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 76 © William Palmer 2022


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