The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Editorial

Reconsidering the Robin

Published: March 20, 2011

Emily Dickinson may have “dreaded that first robin so,” but she speaks for herself alone. To the rest of us, robins bring a mixture of joy and relief, the sign of a natural cycle still intact. The snow withdraws, and returning robins follow it across newly open ground like shorebirds tracing a falling tide. Their movement is almost as distinctive as their call: hasten and pause, hasten and pause. Once the ground is thoroughly thawed, there they are, tugging on earthworms as though they were the hawsers of the S.S. Earth.

And yet it’s only the first few robins in spring that really stand out. Soon we overlook them — because they’re so common and so open in manner, always in plain sight, flying low, nesting just out of reach above us. We see the familiarity as much as the bird itself, which wears, as always, a morning coat of gray and a waistcoat of the most understated red.

Give it a breast as vivid as the shoulder patches on a red-winged blackbird and the robin would never seem to recede the way it does as spring rushes onward, out-colored and out-sung by the birds of summer.

Somehow the robin stands for all the birds migrating now, the great V’s of geese heading north, the catbirds that will show up surreptitiously in a month. It also stands for the surprise of spring itself, which we had begun to fear would not arrive. We have all been keeping watch, as though one morning it might come sailing over the horizon. And now it’s here — the air a bit softer, snowdrops and winter aconites blooming, the bees doing their cleaning and the robins building their nests again.