American Robin

This is the American Robin of North America, a thrush. In Britain and Europe, "robin" means the European Robin, a much smaller bird in a different family: see American Robin vs European Robin.

An American Robin is a large, round-bellied songbird with long legs and a fairly long tail. It is gray-brown above with a brick-red to orange breast, a dark head and a yellow bill. Look for the broken white ring around the eye, the white throat streaked with black, and the white patch under the tail as it flies off.

It is the largest thrush in North America: 8 to 11 in (20 to 28 cm) long, with a wingspan of 12 to 16 in (31 to 40 cm), and it weighs 2.7 to 3.0 oz (77 to 85 g). Field guides use "robin-sized" as a yardstick for other birds. When it lands, a robin flicks its tail down several times, and in flight the orange under the wing shows.¹

Males and females are similar, and some birds cannot be sexed at all. A typical female has a paler gray head that contrasts less with her back, a paler orange breast and more white on the belly. Males are at their darkest in spring.

Young robins look different: the breast is pale orange to buff and covered in black spots, the back is speckled with pale spots, and the head is paler. For each stage from egg to juvenile, see baby American Robins.

Robins also vary across the continent. Western birds are paler and duller, with little or no white in the tail corners, while breeders in Newfoundland and Labrador are the darkest, with a blackish back. Birds of the World recognizes seven subspecies, including the very pale San Lucas Robin of southern Baja California, which BirdLife International treats as a separate species.²

The Varied Thrush also has an orange breast, but it has an orange stripe over the eye, orange wing bars and a black band across the breast. In western Mexico, and rarely in the Southwest, the Rufous-backed Robin has a rufous back, no white around the eye and a more heavily streaked throat.

The song is a clear, caroling run of rising and falling whistles, often written as cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up. The robin is one of the first birds to sing at dawn and one of the last at dusk.

Three calls are worth knowing. A sharp chuck or yeep is the alarm, aimed at snakes, jays and other predators. A rapid, rising chirr comes from winter flocks and birds taking off. A thin, high seet warns of a hawk overhead, and robins that hear it stop and look up at the sky.

Males start singing in late winter or early spring, sing most during courtship, and most go quiet in July and August while they molt. Most song is over by the end of October, though some robins sing through the winter.

Each male has 6 to 20 song types, and up to 85% of the notes in a robin's song are its own inventions rather than copies of its neighbors.³

Where there is artificial light, robins may start singing in the middle of the night: at one site in Pennsylvania the first songs came as early as 1:11 a.m.³

Almost anywhere with lawns and trees: yards, parks, towns, farmyards and golf courses, and also forests, burned or logged woodland, mountains up to the treeline and the tundra. Robins breed across nearly all of the US and Canada, north into Alaska, and south into the highlands of Mexico.

Across most of the US you can see robins in any month. In Florida they are mainly winter visitors, and in Alaska summer ones.

Some do and some do not. Most robins that breed in the interior of Canada and the northern US spend the winter in the southern US and Mexico, while those in the far south, and many along the Pacific coast, stay all year.³ Many others stay surprisingly far north, but in winter they roost in trees and roam in flocks after berries, so you see far fewer on lawns. The "first robin of spring" may be a bird that spent the winter only a few miles away.

Robins migrate in flocks by day. In spring large numbers move north through Florida and the Gulf states from late February, roughly keeping pace with the thaw, and reach Michigan by early April.

Wherever there is fruit. Winter flocks of a dozen to several hundred birds wander between fruiting trees and shrubs, and gather at night in communal roosts that can hold an estimated quarter of a million birds.³¹ There is no evidence that robins return to the same winter spot each year, and a flock moves on once the fruit runs out.

Watch a short lawn after rain or mowing: robins prefer short grass, and mowing sets off a burst of feeding. In winter, look up instead of down: check fruiting holly, hawthorn and juniper, and listen for the low cuck notes of a flock.

Earthworms and insects in spring and summer, fruit in fall and winter. Besides worms, robins eat beetles, caterpillars, grubs and snails, and a long list of fruit, from chokecherries, dogwood and sumac to hawthorn and juniper berries.

The switch is dramatic. In an analysis of 1,169 robin stomachs collected across North America, fruit made up more than 90% of the diet in fall and winter but less than 10% in spring.³

A robin hunting worms runs a few steps, stops, cocks its head to stare at the ground, then stabs. Early studies concluded it was looking, not listening, but in experiments published in 1997, captive robins found buried mealworms by hearing alone, and found fewer when white noise was played.⁴

Robins that eat nothing but honeysuckle fruit can become intoxicated.

Robins do visit feeders. Project FeederWatch lists fruit, mealworms, suet, hulled sunflower seeds and peanut hearts for them, offered on the ground or on a platform feeder.⁵

Water draws them too: robins bathe in birdbaths, puddles and lawn sprinklers. And go easy on lawn insecticides. In Québec, lawns treated with chlorpyrifos produced fewer young robins, probably because the treatment reduced the earthworms.³

The female builds a sturdy cup of dead grass and twigs, shapes it with the wrist of her wing, plasters it with mud from worm castings and lines it with fine grass. The nest sits on a firm branch, often in the lower half of a tree, or on a ledge: gutters, eaves and outdoor light fixtures all get used.

She lays three or four sky-blue eggs, sometimes five, and incubates them for 12 to 14 days. The chicks leave the nest about 13 days after hatching, and most pairs raise two broods a year, sometimes three. An active nest is protected: under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act it is illegal to destroy a nest with eggs or young in it.⁶

More detail: American Robin nesting and eggs and baby American Robins.

Robins nest on ledges, so NestWatch's design for them is an open nest shelf rather than an enclosed box, mounted 5 to 25 ft up on a building or post in a sheltered spot, such as under the eaves or over a light fixture.⁷

On a lawn a robin runs a few quick steps, stops dead and stands upright to scan; in long grass it hops. It spends about three-quarters of its time simply perching or standing still.

In the breeding season males hold a territory with song and chases, and some attack their own reflection in a window. Robins are keen bathers, and on warm afternoons they sunbathe on lawns with their wings spread and tail fanned.

Do American Robins mate for life? No. A pair stays together through a breeding season, but any re-pairing in later years seems to be chance. Even within a season, faithfulness is relative: in one Illinois study, 62 to 72% of broods included at least one chick fathered by a male other than the mate.³

Many breeding adults come back to the same territory year after year. Robins also judge people: in one study they let a person come closer when the person stayed on a path and was not looking at them, and robins nesting near buildings give fewer alarm calls.³

Outside the breeding season robins become sociable, feeding in loose flocks and sleeping in communal roosts. In summer, males and young birds roost together while females sleep on their nests.

Most robins live short lives. Long-term field studies found that only about 40% of nests produce young, and only a quarter of the young that leave the nest are still alive in November. After that, only about half of adult robins live from one year to the next, so the whole population turns over in about six years.¹

A young robin that makes it to its first November lives, on average, about another 1.7 years.³

Hawks take adults, especially Cooper's and Sharp-shinned Hawks, and domestic cats kill many. Snakes, Blue Jays, crows, Common Grackles, squirrels, chipmunks and raccoons raid nests. Cars and windows kill many more: in a statewide survey in Indiana, robins were the most common bird found dead along roads.³

The oldest known wild American Robin, identified from its leg band, was 13 years and 11 months old.¹

The American Robin is of Least Concern. There are an estimated 370 million adults,² and numbers are stable or rising slightly: about 0.13% a year on the North American Breeding Bird Survey between 1966 and 2019.⁸ Suburbs, farms and watered lawns have helped it spread, because they bring earthworms near the surface.

Robins also warn of pollution. In the 1950s, DDT sprayed against Dutch elm disease killed many robins on the Michigan State University campus, because earthworms concentrate the chemical; populations took 10 to 17 years to recover.³

Like other native songbirds, it is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.