Notebook 5: Robins. End of September.

I don't recognize a lot of the birds around here. It's not my environment yet, and I'm not much of a birder anyway, so it's hard. A lot of the birds fall into the category of boring, brown, but that's probably not a good enough excuse for my mental habit of classifying them all as basically sparrows. Of course, if you take the time to really look, you'll see that some of these finchy-looking guys have very unsparrowish beaks and others are bigger or more noisy or have differently shaped wings or whatever. Unfortunately, all that really tells me is that that particular bird belongs in the category of “not sparrows.” It doesn't really do anything to help me figure out what that bird actually is.

I've always had a soft spot for birds, but my attention has mostly focused in the direction of the majestic and flamboyant. I love raptors and crows and parrots and mockingbirds because they have larger-than-life personalities. Even just a hawk on its perch will survey the world with a cold intensity that demands attention. That's not the same for the boring little brown birds, or at least I never expected that sort of thing from them. So it's with a certain degree of embarrassment that I have to admit that for more than a month I have failed to identify one of the most ubiquitous and iconic birds in North America.

The realization came during a phone call to my mother. She asked me how my nature writing was going and I began to describe a certain bird I had seen around my site. It was about the size of a sparrow, but had a red-orange breast and showed an irritable swagger in its dealings with other birds. I had no idea what it was. “Are you sure its not a robin?” she asked. There was a pause, followed by me groaning for effect. Of course it was a robin.

Though they are a common sight for most Americans, I somehow managed to grow up in a part of the country where robins are not so common. Or, perhaps, they were there, but somehow I never really noticed them. Maybe it's a matter of migration. In New England, where my mom grew up, the robins disappear every fall and return in the spring. Their comings and goings mark the change in the seasons and the passing of the days. Do the birds in California do the same thing? Some birds – many, many species, in fact – do migrate to California to escape the northern winter. Others pass through on their way to points further south. Robins in California might be doing either, or they might just live here. Will these robins still be in the airport field hunting for worms when summer comes or are they, like so many visitors to Humboldt County, just looking for a warm, comfortable place to crash for a while?