There are approximately 50 American robins in my front yard, a noisy, colorful flock centered around my crabapple tree. They have been partying for at least 24 hours, gorging themselves on the fruit and singling lustily.
These festive aggregations are a common feature of spring throughout the United States as the birds migrate. Robins are big colorful thrushes that do well in the Anthropocene. They like the same sorts of habitats we do: lots of grass and a few trees and shrubs, and the expansion of the suburban landscape has increased their numbers in the last several decades.
We often mistake rarity for value and disdain the common. Robins are sometimes victims of this reflexive snobbery. I too have caught a bird in the corner of my eye, only to turn away once I identified it as “just a robin.” So in celebration of the flock that is visiting me, I looked up American robins in four bird books: one from 1827, one from 1922, one from 1988, and one from 2019.
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Just past lunchtime one warm Tuesday last spring, as I walked through my neighborhood to the local Indian restaurant for samosas, I saw a big yard sale going on. I’ve long been a fan of a good rummage sale—that hunt for something tired and old to dust off and love anew. From a distance I could see the usual household bits and bops, some well-used furniture, and piles of clothes and bedding spread over half a block of sidewalk and trampled grass. Odds and ends seemed to have toppled down the steps of the townhouse hosting the event—it was a remarkably disorganized set up. People poked around, others loaded items into trunks and back seats of hastily parked cars as drivers waited, engines running.
