Visitors who have never had much to do with birds at close quarters—and the birds may be said to be part of the family at this cottage, for they live with us and meal with us—are usually surprised at the differences and the distinctiveness of their various personalities.
The robin not only adopts you at once, but he proceeds to supervise your every action, and instals himself as your personal attendant. Probably this is all the more emphasized by the fact that he will not allow any rival to encroach on his particular territory. Most birds seem to peg out a claim at the beginning of the season, and to resent, more or less, the intrusion of any other of its own kind. Swallows and sparrows and rooks, and a few others, build in colonies, but the majority of birds seem to prefer a little domain each to himself, wife and family, and you will find one pair of blackbirds driving another from the laurel bush they have chosen, or chasing strangers from the particular garden path they call their own.
Though starlings feed—and chatter—in flocks, one particular pair of starlings make it their business to oust any other starling that they find on the bird board.
But the robin can be a perfect terror in the way he seeks to domineer over the whole earth. It is a very large area that he marks off for his individual own, and woe betide any other robin who tries to defy him—unless he be the stronger of the two. One of our robins killed his own wife (we conclude, as she disappeared, after a series of thrashings he gave her daily!), and then he injured the wing of one of his own youngsters, because we had petted them, and given them food inside the living room.
The father used to hide behind a stone down on the garden bed, and watch as his family—the mother and two babies—nervously and timidly approached the bird-board, looking round anxiously lest father should see! Then, when they started to feed, he would hiss out the dreadfullest of wicked words at them, and fling himself on them, bashing them with his beak—a positive little fury.
So one day I put some food on the table inside the room, and the down-trodden ones hopped in. I shut the window before the irate father could follow them. He seemed demented with rage, when he saw them feeding and couldn’t get at them; he literally stamped his foot, and viciously tossed off all the pieces of food that were on the board, flinging them to the ground in a most highly-glazed specimen of temper!
I let the family out by a side window, instead of the bird-board window, and they evaded their loving and affectionate relative for a little while. But he found them at last; and went for his wife, while the children cheeped forlornly among the pansies in the border. We never saw her again, poor, plucky little soul; and one of the youngsters dragged a broken wing along the path next day, explaining to me, pitifully, that he couldn’t possibly get up to the bird-board now, neither could he find mother anywhere.
I took him in, and tried to save his life—but it was no use. With all our knowledge and skill and discoveries and training, what clumsy, inadequate creatures we are in comparison with a little mother bird!