American robin

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus described this bird in 1766, in the twelfth edition of Systema Naturae. The scientific name joins the Latin word for a thrush with a verb meaning to move house. English speakers have used the word robin for the bird since at least 1703. The European robin sits in the Old World flycatcher family, so the shared name records a shared colour and nothing more. The American bird is a true thrush of the genus Turdus, in the family Turdidae.

Seven subspecies are accepted. Six of them blend into one another where their ranges meet, so the borders between them are vague. Only the bird of southern Baja California stands clearly apart. That form, T. m. confinis, is small, pale and does not migrate. It breeds above 1,000 metres in the Sierra de la Laguna. Two major bird checklists still treat it as a subspecies rather than a species.

Evolution and relatives

Genetic work published in 2020 placed the rufous-collared thrush of Central America as the closest relative. A study from 2007 had reached the same answer. Work published in 2026 went further, and suggested the rufous-collared thrush sits inside the American robin's own family tree. The same work found the Baja California population to be the oldest branch of the group. That population may deserve the rank of a full species.

Beyond that trio, the nearest relatives are other Central American thrushes. The black thrush and the sooty thrush are the next pair out. The pattern points to a recent spread northwards from Central America into the rest of the continent. Two older studies of a single mitochondrial gene had pointed instead to African thrushes. Support for that result was weak, and the newer work overturned it.

Appearance

An adult robin has a grey-brown back, a dark head, and a breast that runs from deep brick red to soft orange. A white throat carries black streaks, and the belly and lower tail are white. A white arc sits above and below each eye. The bill is yellow with a dark tip that spreads across it in winter. Legs and feet are brown.

The wingspan measures 31 to 41 centimetres. Males weigh 72 to 94 grams, and females weigh 59 to 91 g. The sexes look alike in shape, but the female is duller, with more brown on the head and a paler front. Plumage alone cannot sex every bird. A young robin is paler again, with heavy dark spots on the breast and whitish edges to the wing coverts. A male in his first year often looks like an adult female.

Habitat and range

The robin breeds from Alaska and northern Canada south to northern Florida and into Mexico. It nests in woodland, orchards, farmland, parks and gardens. The bird needs short grass or bare soil to feed on and a dense shrub or tree to nest in. Suburbs supply both, so robins are common wherever people keep lawns. In the far south of the United States it becomes scarcer, and there it favours big shade trees.

Most birds leave the north by the end of August. They come back in February and March, and the date shifts with latitude and weather. Robins move north with the 3 degree Celsius spring isotherm, which is why they arrive with the thaw. Winter flocks spread across the southern states, central Mexico and the Pacific seaboard. Some birds stay north through the winter wherever fruit lasts. One study found that robins tagged in Alaska travelled up to 3.5 times as far between seasons as birds from Massachusetts.

The species reaches western Europe as a rare vagrant. Britain had logged 30 records by the end of 2024. Stray birds have also turned up in Greenland, Sweden, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Belize. The birds that reach Greenland include the Newfoundland subspecies.

Diet and feeding

About 40 percent of the robin's food is small invertebrates, and about 60 percent is fruit. Earthworms, beetle grubs, caterpillars and grasshoppers make up most of the animal share. Wild and cultivated berries make up the rest. The ability to live on fruit lets robins winter much further north than other thrushes of the continent. Robins have lost the enzyme that splits table sugar, so sucrose tastes wrong to them. Growers use that fact, and spray sugar to keep the birds off a crop.

A robin hunts on the ground, and vision leads the search. It runs, halts, and cocks its head to one side to catch any movement. Tests show that a robin can also place a worm underground by sound alone. Once it finds a worm it pounces and pulls the animal out of the soil. Parents feed nestlings on earthworms and other soft-bodied prey. Birds that gorge on fermented berries lose their balance and topple over as they walk.

Behaviour and social life

The robin is active by day. In winter it roosts at night in large flocks, often in a swamp or a block of thick cover. Those roosts break up at dawn, and the birds feed on fruit in smaller parties. In summer the pattern reverses. Each male holds a breeding territory and drives rival males off it.

Young robins stay near the nest site for their first four months. They then join flocks of mixed ages before the move south. Almost every population migrates. A feeding robin watches its neighbours, and reads their alarm as its own. The bird will mob a jay or a snake rather than hide from it. Males also attack their own reflection in glass and polished metal.

Communication and senses

The male sings a long carol of short units, repeated and strung together with brief gaps. Listeners write the phrase as cheerily, cheer up, cheer up. He sings from a high perch, and the style changes with the region and the hour. The song season runs from late February to late July. Some eastern birds carry on into September or beyond. Robins open the dawn chorus, often hours before any light shows.

The Baja California subspecies has a thinner song, without clear notes. Besides the song, the robin has calls that carry specific news. One call marks a predator on the ground, and another marks a threat to the nest. Nestlings chirp to beg within days of hatching. Rival neighbours will drop their quarrel and band together to drive a predator away. Sight leads the hunt for food, but hearing, smell and probably touch all play a part.

Reproduction and life cycle

Breeding starts soon after the birds reach the summer range, and it runs from April to July. It is among the earliest egg layers of any bird on the continent. A pair raises two or three broods in a season. The male and female stay together through the summer and share the work.

The female builds the nest alone. She weaves an outer cup of coarse grass, twigs, paper and feathers. She then works mud into the inside with her breast and lines it with fine grass. Most nests sit 1.5 to 4.5 metres up, in a thick bush or a fork between branches. A window ledge or a porch beam will serve just as well. The pair builds a fresh nest for every brood.

A clutch holds three to five pale blue eggs. The female incubates them for about 14 days. The chicks hatch naked, with their eyes shut for the first days. Parents carry the waste away, so the nest stays clean. The brood leaves the nest about two weeks after hatching, and all the chicks go within two days of each other. Fledglings follow their parents and beg for two more weeks before they fly well.

Predators and threats

The domestic cat is the adult robin's main predator. Accipiter hawks and large snakes such as rat snakes and gopher snakes also take adults. Twenty-eight species of bird of prey hunt this one thrush. Martens, ringtails and long-tailed weasels catch adults on the ground. An adult is most exposed while it is busy with a nest.

Squirrels, snakes, jays, grackles, crows and ravens rob the nests. Raccoons raid nests too, and foxes and dogs pick up fledglings from the ground. Brown-headed cowbirds try to lay in robin nests, but the robin usually throws the egg out. A cowbird chick rarely survives to leave a robin nest. Internal parasites are common, and one study of 105 young robins found 77.1 percent carried them. The robin also acts as a reservoir for West Nile virus.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the American robin as Least Concern. The population stands at about 370 million birds, the highest count for any land bird on the continent. The range covers about 16 million square kilometres. The trend appears steady, and the species is nowhere near the thresholds for a higher category. The western subspecies is spreading in central California, and probably in other parts of the United States.

Climate change and severe weather are the listed threats. NatureServe rates the robin as secure in every Canadian province and territory that assesses it. People once shot robins for the table in some southern states. Federal law now protects the species across the United States. Volunteers have logged 468,239 sightings on iNaturalist. The bird is recorded in 30 countries on GBIF.

Relationship with humans

The robin lives close to people and profits from it. Mown grass, sprinklers and garden shrubs supply food and nest sites. The bird will nest on a porch or a window ledge without much fuss. Gardeners value robins for the beetles and grubs they take from a bed. Fruit growers hold the opposite view, because flocks strip a berry crop.

Males peck at windows, windscreens and hubcaps when they see a rival in the reflection. The robin is harmless to people. The one health link runs the other way, through West Nile virus in mosquitoes. Like other wild thrushes, it needs live prey and open ground, so it does not suit a cage. Keeping one is illegal in the United States in any case.

In culture and myth

Connecticut, Michigan and Wisconsin all name the robin as their state bird. Canada put it on the two dollar note of the 1986 Birds of Canada series. A Native American story tells how the bird gained its red breast. In that story it fanned a dying campfire back to life and saved a man and a boy. The Tlingit of the northwest coast held that Raven made the robin so its song would please people.

In Quebec, a superstition promises good luck to whoever sees the first robin of spring. William Henry Drummond built a poem on that belief. Emily Dickinson wrote about dreading the year's first robin. Harry M. Woods wrote a popular song about a red robin bobbing along. A cartoon strip from 1990 used the same idea for a joke about spring.

The paint and crayon colour robin egg blue takes its name from the eggs. A study of 209 psychology students found the robin was their model of what a bird is. A family of robins nested on the Canadian end of the Peace Bridge and drew press attention in the 1930s.