Star of the Season - Robin Redbreast

I found this article in an old copy of the Country Living magazine which I thought I would share with you, about robins, as they are very much a part of the Christmas season.

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"When we think of Christmas, we think of the robin.  Its association with this festive time of year is an essential part of British life.  There are five and a half million robins in the UK and it is one of our most common birds with numbers remaining fairly stable.  They were hit by the harsh winter last year but a good breeding season has enabled them to recover.  As a regular visitor to the winter bird table and with a liquid warbling song, it's not surprising that the robin's cheery presence and its reputation as a domestic bird have seen it become a symbol of Christmas.

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But there is another connection: with the very notion of postage and so, specifically, with Christmas cards.  In Framley Parsonage, Anthony Trollope refers to the 'robin postman' - he had worked in the Post Office in 1860 when postmen wore a red coat.  The red uniforms showed the dirt, however, so were changed to dark blue with red facings a year later.  The nickname presumably vanished soon afterwards but not before Christmas cards had become popular - and the colour remains on letter boxes and Royal Mail vans.

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The robin's place around the homestead, and in English literature, it seems, is due to the combination of mild winters and a kindness towards birds.  After a lengthy correspondence and poll in The Times in 1960, it was elected to the status of Britain's national bird.  There scarcely seems to have been a time when it wasn't.
Their willingness to nest almost anywhere, for instance, famously in an unmade bed and a gardener's jacket pocket (built between breakfast and lunch).  Their enjoyment of human company (there are many stories of robins that live in churches, and join in the singing).  Their loyalty, their lack of pretence, their bad-weather sturdiness.  There is a hint of moral approval in our love of the birds, even a sense that we glimpse our own imagined national characteristics in their behaviour: the robin - named probably after the friendly sprite Robin Goodfellow - as an avian John Bull, a flighted oak tree.

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The robin's eyes have a lot to do with it, those pert piercing beads, 'like black dewdrops' as Frances Hodgson Burnett describes them in The Secret Garden.  They are side-mounted like most birds, but in that classic robinesque cock of the head they seem to look directly as us.  We are caught in the frankness of that gaze, confronted by an unafraid, unthreatening being as we rarely are by any other creature.  No wonder we melt, and feel for a moment that we both live in the same one world."

Adapted from Redbreast:  The robin in life and literature by Andrew Lack.  This book is an updated and extended version of Robin Redbreast, originally published in 1950 by Andrew's father, eminent ornithologist David Lack. amazon

On Christmas day I sit and think

Thoughts white as snow and black as ink

My nearest kinsman, turned a knave,

Robbed me of all that I could save.

When he was gone, and I was poor,

His sister yelped me from her door.

The Robin sings his Christmas song.

And no bird has a sweeter tongue.

God bless them all - my wife so true,

And pretty Robin Redbreast too.

God bless my kinsman far away,

And give his sister joy this day.

W.H.Davies from A Poets Calender (1927)

All the above taken from a Country Living article December 2010