Truth, Truth
In which robins tangle with windows
An audio version of this issue is available here. Carol Van Klompenburg has an MA in theater arts and is available for reading performances on various topics throughout Central Iowa. Her email address is: carolvk13@gmail.com
One morning, a couple of decades ago, I was awakened at 6:00 a.m. by a rapid rapping noise in the basement bedroom where we were weekend guests. Our relatives, Ken and Ladonna Huisman, had recently retired from their farm to this house in Orange City.
I raised my head and looked groggily around. The rapping grew more insistent. I gazed between my feet toward the door. No, the knocking wasn’t there; it was on the window. I stumbled across the carpet and cracked open the curtain. A robin flew up out of the window well. I burrowed back under the covers and drifted back toward sleep. She returned and pecked some more. I tossed off the covers and headed for the shower.
At breakfast I mentioned the bird’s visit. Ken and Ladonna nodded. They said a robin had been pecking at several basement windows every day that spring. The former owners of the house had mentioned the same pesky pecking. As I remember it across the mist of decades, Ken said he thought perhaps the house was built on the site of a previous nest, and the robin’s instincts were directing her back to it—over and over and over.
I marveled at the robin’s instinctive GPS. The internal navigation system of that bird is phenomenal, I thought. Each spring she returns to the same yard and wants to occupy the exact location as the previous year. Amazing! Over the years that robin and her stupendous GPS have made a great conversation piece.
In my home on a winding road north of Pella, Iowa, my directional sense tells me my front door faces south. It doesn’t. It faces east. So during an animated conversation, when I think I am gesturing toward town, I am usually pointing away from it. Who would have thought a bird’s instincts were that precise? That bird’s sense of location exceeds mine! The next year, the robin repeated its feat. And the next.
Twenty years later, the bedroom walls in my relatives’ home have been repainted and the mattress has been replaced, but the robins have not stopped pecking Whenever I hear them, my deeply entrenched thought pattern still comes with the force of long habit. They are trying to get back to their home territory to nest, and they can’t.
Today, musing yet again about those amazing birds, I want to learn more about their instincts and abilities. Research has become much easier online. Truth, Truth. . . . I start Googling. I learn that robins were named after the European robin redbreast by homesick immigrants—but they are actually only a distant relative of that bird. Maybe the mated pairs are homesick, too—homesick for the honeymoon nest of their first mating. An online ornithologist informs me, however, that robins do not mate for life, although sometimes a male and female do return to the same area and mate again for a second season. Sometimes they return to the exact nesting site—especially if it has been safe and successful. So far, so good. This pair of robins must have a stronger bond than average. How long do robins live? I wonder. I look it up. The average lifespan of a robin is just thirteen months. That can’t be, I think. I read further. I learn that robins who survive their first year often reach the age of five or six. But that is still far less than two decades. How can that be? The same robin has been. . .Uh, oh. Maybe it’s not the same robin.
But then why do robins keep pecking on those windows? The new culprits must be descendants of the original, I conclude. The map and gyroscope are genetically implanted in their brains from the previous generation. Finally, I Google the question I should have asked first: “Why do robins peck on windows?”
An Audubon Society entry pops up: “The root of this behavior is territorial. When birds select a nest site, the surrounding area becomes their territory, and they defend it vigorously. . .When a bird, searching for a nesting site, accidentally sees its image in a reflective surface on its territory, it mistakes it for a rival and tries to drive the ‘interloper’ away.” Those robins were not pining for their home territory to nest. They were defending against a mirror-image competitor.
THIS CANNOT BE! It MUST be just one of several explanations. I Google different phrase combinations, but I cannot not find a single entry that confirms robins are trying to get back to a previous year’s nest, pining and pecking forlornly on windows. I sigh and walk backward through the decades. Now I am not even sure whether that first false factoid about longing for their nests came from Ken. Perhaps I invented it myself after breakfast.
I have been an editor who has checked writers’ quotations against the originals for comma errors. I have been a Facebook fiend who checks Snopes for each Facebook post with even the faintest scent of fiction. I have been unfriended on Facebook for my blunt critiques of unchecked facts. And each time I have wondered, indignantly, Why do those birdbrained idiots not check the facts? How can they. . .? Like those generations of robins, I have been pecking and pecking at the people who fail to check the facts. And, for decades, I have been repeating the fiction of the homesick robin, forlornly pecking at the window and longing for a favorite nesting spot.
The robins at that basement window (possibly a different bird each year) mistake their own reflection for a rival. Today, a Google search has been my looking glass. Today, I have met the enemy. And today that false-facts enemy is I.
On the other hand—at least I got it partly right: If robins can return to the same general area year after year, they DO still have an amazing GPS.
Adapted from Tending Beauty; Forty Moments in my Gardens. Copyright 2018. Out of print, but I have a few copies available. Contact me at carolvk13@gmail.
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