In the darkest days of January, after I had taken up the decking and dug a hole to plant my apple tree, a robin became the first visitor to my newly-made wildlife garden.
She appeared in a flash on top of the fence, flew to the wall and then spotted me and darted off again. She had been here before, I realised, perhaps lured by the recently unveiled earth and its unearthed worms, or the new compost heap, or even the hanging feeder with its diminishing quantity of sunflower hearts. (Robins have only recently learned to use hanging feeders. And you can tell – they look ridiculous.)
She hung around for a few days, standing stock-still on her skinny stick legs, watching me turn the earth. Sometimes she would dive down and eat worms and other grubs, other times she stayed on the wall, brown legs splayed, bobbing up and down. Once I spotted her on the apple she had watched me plant, twiggy like her, a feathered maiden. After the apple I planted two climbing roses. Then I put a robin nest box up – an optimistic effort, considering the garden was still 90% mud and stones.
In spring she disappeared. During the next few months the garden grew; I got rid of the last bits of decking and stones, dug a pond. Everything turned green. The house sparrows became regular visitors, but the robin – or any robin – never came back. I didn’t even hear one.
And then, yesterday, she returned. I had dug and planted a new border and was busy mulching it with home-made compost. Everything was little red brandling worms and leaf litter, which I tucked under the leaves of newly transplanted foxgloves and around dying clumps of whatever would come back next year. There she was, suddenly, picking around the mulch, taking worms. She worked at my feet, untroubled by me and my fork, and almost took a worm from my hand. She stayed with me all afternoon, exploring the apple tree and the roses and the pond and the lawn – a habitat. I liked to think she approved of the progress since all the mud and stones.
I’m fairly sure “my robin” is a winter migrant. To disappear in spring like that and return in autumn suggests she has another territory elsewhere. Most robins are sedentary, but some migrate for winter, often over the Channel, while British residents are sometimes joined by those from Scandinavia. I think this one is British – Scandinavian birds tend to be less used to humans and are therefore much more wary of us; I had winter robins and blackbirds in my previous garden in London, and they skulked under the shrubbery, flying off the second they saw me. This one seems far less shy.
Of course, it could be two robins – January’s may have died and October’s could be a young one, exploring new territories. But, regardless, it’s a new bird in my garden and I’m happy to have it. The mulch will provide weeks of worms and other morsels, and there’s a holly next-door but one, just coming into fruit. There are sunflower hearts both in the hanging feeder and the ground feeder, and a pond and bird bath to bathe in. The apple tree I planted the day I first saw her is just about to lose its first leaves.
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Kate Bradbury is building a wildlife garden from scratch on small patch of land in Brighton: read her previous posts here. She is the author of The Wildlife Gardener.
