Robins

“The English robin is a bird rather smaller than a sparrow, in build between a thrush and a warbler, uniform brown on the upper parts, with an orange red breast and white abdomen. It is widely distributed through the woodlands of Europe, and in Britain is also a familiar garden bird.”

Stephen Moss quoting the great ornithologist, David Lock in his 'The Life of the Robin', 1943.

Isn’t there something heart-warming about our avian friend, who is a feature on our Christmas cards in the last month of our year and in the winter season? This is an image on a card I received from my dear friend, J this year.*

It is archetypal of the rather romantic picture we have of a lone songster in a bleak and hostile environment, its red breast puffed out, perhaps indicating to us hope of the new year and the warmer climate of spring to come.

This blog will give insight into the realities of this beautiful and familiar bird that has found its way into every art form involving the visual, aural and even the kinaesthetic. You will learn how and why it should be associated with the Christmas season and its actual relevance to the Christian religion.

Bird lovers, you will also know what you should leave out for them in a freezing cold winter.

Well, here goes. We will start with robin statistics.
Height: 5.5 inches, 14 cm
Wingspan: 8.4 inches, 21 cm
Weight 18 g approximately
Lifespan: 1-2 years

It has a membership of the largest of all the world bird orders – the Passeriforms. This bracket of bird includes almost half of the world’s species. Four thousand, like the robin are songbirds.

The robin is the only species on its individual genus Erithacus. There are one hundred different robins and some species of birds termed robins are not really robins at all. There will be more on this later.

Their plumage is not always so colourful. Juvenile robins, which are around in the spring seasons, are brown, mottled and often speckled in appearance. Only adults have the familiar orangey-red feathers. Females and males are identical in appearance.

In the UK we think of it as British. In fact, robins inhabit Europe, from Gibraltar to beyond the Arctic Circle, the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Robins in Eastern Europe leave their breeding ground in autumn where they look for warmer climates, including the UK.

The actual nature of this bird suggests Tennyson’s description of nature in his poem In Memoriam, A. H.H. as,

“red in tooth and claw”.

According to Stephen Moss, author of 'The Robin: a Biography', they are vicious and when competing for a mate, duel their rival to death. Their mating season starts in January.

There is one reason this male sings so sweetly. It is to breed, their sole purpose and instinct in life. The song is a call to a mate. They often die shortly after this. They are territorial and defensive of territory they establish, frequenting cities and the countryside, often inhabiting woodland areas.

In March and April their song is continuous, but the aim is to repel other males. Once they have their territory established, they begin nest building, egg laying and finding food for their hungry chicks, particularly vulnerable at this time to jays and magpies, which prey on the chicks. In the autumn, the juveniles develop their beautiful bright coat.

Why should these birds be on Christmas cards? Interestingly, they do have a connection with Christianity. Among ancient folklore is a tale about a robin trying to keep the baby Jesus’ fire lit, and doing so, scorching its breast, symbolizing its devotion. Mary then humbly declares that its red breast is to be handed down to its descendants.

There is also a connection to the crucifixion. Another legend concerns a crown of thorns, which a robin plucks from Jesus’ crown when he is on the cross, which leads to its breast being stained with blood.

During the Victorian era the new tradition of sending Christmas cards emerged because of the development in printing, which led to robins being a favourite on cards. Sir Henry Cole sent the first Christmas card in 1843 then the size of a business card used today, because at first, they were expensive to make. By the 1860s, cheaper cards were available.

Postmen were referred to as “robins” because they wore red coats as part of their uniforms. It led to the bird becoming a festive symbol.

By the 1880s, Victorian artists showed the robin delivering Christmas cards to peoples’ houses instead of a postman – and the tradition has stuck. The British love to give feathered and four-legged creatures anthropomorphic qualities. See the image below.

A modern Christmas card in Victorian style, with the robin delivering the Christmas card to a recipient. This looks rather cute, don’t you think? I would like to see the robin at my door! Or on my local post box!

Until the mid-twentieth century, this bird also acquired the nickname Redbreast. The description ‘redbreast’ first appeared in the fifteenth century and was used until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1952, the British Ornithologist’s Union showed the species official name as ‘redbreast’. The Victorians no doubt helped with this by giving the bird human qualities of delivery. It would have seemed natural to give the bird a name Robin redbreast. There is a pleasing alliteration that would have appealed to children of the time.

Moss, in his book points out that the bird’s breast is actually orange, rather than red, and suggests that it was called redbreast because the actual fruit orange only appeared in the Middle Ages. It is referenced in the nursery rhyme,

“Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of Saint Clements.”

The rhyme heralds the excitement of the bells of an exciting and tasty new fruit to arrive on Britain’s shores at that time. The colour orange was first used in 1557, over a hundred years after the word ‘redbreast’ was used to describe the robin. There was no colour called orange in the Middle Ages and it only became an accepted shade one hundred years after the fruit orange was imported into Britain.

The robin has since found its way onto clothing and Christmas decorations, solidifying it as a Christian icon in the UK and elsewhere.

The name, ‘robin’, if not the actual species, proliferated round the world because of sailors and explorers, who, landing in other parts of the world and having no ornithological expertise at all, called all kinds of small colourful birds with red, pink or yellow breasts robins.

The name stuck, however, which is why there are Siberian blue robins, Indonesian cloud-forest robins, Polynesian robins and the American robins, which are not robins at all!

The robin has made its presence in all art forms. Apart from the visual, the paintings, drawings, decorations and embroidery kits, on which it is displayed, the robin has found its place in orchestral, ensemble and popular music and across traditional and pop dance.

French composer Olivier Messiaen, a passionate ornithologist, in addition to being a genius as a musician, loved the robin and his music reflects this, featuring the European robin in his small bird sketches, (Petites Equisses d’Oiseaux. There is a movement titled Le Rouge-Gorge, (The Robin).

His large, orchestral work Des Canyons aux Etoilles has a movement titled Le Cossyphe d’Heuglin, The White-Browed Robin-Chat, (an African Robin).

Here is Matthew Schellhorn live, 29th January 2021 playing Robin, by Messiaen. While this is playing, you will see drawings by talented children and youths of the robin. These illustrations are fitting to be shown while the music is playing of the man who regarded birds as “the greatest musicians upon the planet.” Link: Robin

In popular music, the “American robin” that inspired the Al Jolson hit When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along, is actually a THRUSH. (Remember our sailors and explorers?) 
According to Moss, it is “lumbering and bulky”, not like our robin at all. Link: Red Red Robin

This thrush is also the bird referred to in the hit Rockin’ Robin, made popular in 1972 by Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five. Remember anyone? Link: Rockin Robin

Here, you see the robin represented kinaesthetically with dance. They have movements called ‘tweets’ with jive steps, bouncy motions and running in circles with high knees to create a bird-like movement.

For robin movements, choreographers create quick, sharp, head movements, (rocking the head and listening for prey), hopping and sudden stops, pausing and perching movements alternated by moments of stillness followed by spurts of energy.

A more traditional robin dance is where the men and women dance in a counterclockwise circle. The movements are inspired by the running and hopping of the robin. Link: Iroquois Robin Dance

In literature, the writer Anthony Trollope, himself a post office employee has characters in his novel 'Framley Parsonage', who refer to the postman by his nickname.

This postman says, “Oh, but it is mortal wet,” as he hands the vicar the post and newspaper.
Jemima the cook responds with the phrase, “Come in, Robin Postman, and warm yourself awhile.”

Other writers who use the robin in their repertoire include Enid Blyton, Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Robert Herrick, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The British, ardent bird lovers in general, do have a soft spot for the robin.

In 2015, the robin topped the polls for Britain’s favourite bird, while in 1960 it was crowned Britain’s national bird.

These lines, from 'Robin Redbreast', by W H Davies, (1908) sum up our national affection for it.

Robin on a leafless bough,
Lord in heaven, how he sings!
Now cold winter’s cruel wind
Makes playmates of withered things.

Robins are aware of our feelings and, perhaps unbelievably, there is a relationship between the robin and us. They know we leave out food for them in cold winter months, when the ground becomes too cold and hard for them to find food and makes them vulnerable to starvation and death. Even woodland birds know to visit the British garden.

The custom of the British being generous towards feeding birds began over one thousand, five hundred years ago as did our love for the robin.

There is the story of a youth, (Saint Serf), taming a robin by giving it food but his classmates killed it out of jealousy. Miraculously, his friend Kentigen, (later St Mungo) brought the robin back to life.

Feeding birds declined through the centuries but was revived in the Victorian era when they extended their charity to all God’s creatures, with the exception of workhouse residents.

In 1890-91 the writer W H Hudson noted working men gathering along the side of the River Thames during their lunch break to give scraps of food to starving birds, which led to the custom of regularly feeding our birds in our gardens.

The result is that fourteen million households leave food out for garden birds and there are more than six million breeding pairs of robins in this country owing to our generosity to this breed of bird. This is surely a great achievement.

So when you put out food in bird feeders, remember to include sunflower hearts and corn grains for our robins to keep the population high as these give them energy.

In the next few days, listen out for the sweet song of the robin and Happy Christmas to you all.

Anne G. Dilley

*This image is on a card to raise money for the Leprosy Mission, see THELEPROSYMISSION.COM

Bibliography:

The Robin, a Biography by Stephen Moss

postalmuseum.org/blog/a-history-of-christmas-cards

https://poetrynook.com

https://www.bostonglobe.com

https://www.youtube.com

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Magical Creatures

When I think of furry little creatures I go a little bit squishy. I think of the characters that were so beautifully illustrated in the Beatrice Potter stories. Tom Kitten, Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin: Surely the most adorable and best loved creatures in children's literature.

Naturally, in real life, farmers see many of these animals as pests. As a young girl I often saw little men in black velvet - better known as moles, fastened to barbed wire fences along the edges of fields. Boys on the school bus teased us, saying that the farmer put them there so cruelly to warn other moles to move on but of course moles are blind so it was a bad joke. The true reason for impaling the dead moles was to dry them out so that the skins were easier to remove. Farmers sewed them together to make warm lining for their coats. Living in the countryside can be very upsetting.

One small furry animal that I am particularly fond of is the hare. I have only been lucky enough to encounter a hare once, driving along a country lane late at night. The hare was running directly towards me and froze my headlights beam. It was a magical moment. What a noble creature. Long, black-tipped ears, a white tail and strong back legs. Brown hares either live solitary or in pairs. They are incredibly fast, running at up to 45 miles per hour when evading predators.

The Romans are credited with introducing brown hares to Britain more than 2,000 years ago. If we are to believe the story of the Iceni queen Boudica consulting the entrails of a hare as an augury of victory in her uprising against the Romans in AD61, the animals had established themselves quickly. The brown hare is now considered naturalised. Curiously they are not found in Scotland or the Scottish Islands. 

Unfortunately for this magnificent animal, it is considered game and the hare season begins on the so-called Glorious Twelfth of August, when it is acceptable to take to the mosaic fields of Britain and shoot them. Like all game, there are many ways to cook hare - jugged is the most traditional method. Although I have eaten rabbit, I have never been tempted to eat hare. I recently switched off a cooking programme on TV because the cook was using hare in a game pie recipe. I cannot understand it at all. It should be a crime to kill a hare. 

In hare mythology, the hare is a creature with pagan, sacred and mystic associations, by turns benign, cunning, romantic or, most famously, in its March courtship rituals, mad. It is largely silent, preferring to feed at night or, in summer, as the last light fades from the day, a shadowy existence which adds to its mysteriousness. 

In Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit stories the character of Hare is superior and strutting, occasionally pernickety, always aloof – a rendering for children of the animal’s natural reserve as well his appropriateness as a denizen of that world of aristocratic entitlement evoked by Sackville-West. For example, it is Hare who keeps Grey Rabbit up to scratch in the matter of housekeeping: “Where’s the milk, Grey Rabbit?” asked Hare. “We can’t drink tea without milk.”

As with so many forms of British wildlife, today’s hares are threatened by changing agricultural practice. Larger fields with a single cereal crop a year curtail hares’ year-round food supply while offering them diminished cover, and their forms – shallow depressions in the ground – offer limited shelter and, potentially, a degree of exposure and vulnerability. A survey in 2008 estimated current brown hare numbers in Britain in the region of 800,000, a figure which represents a consistent if gradual decline since the Sixties. Unlike rabbits, hares are resistant to myxomatosis and have suffered no equivalent cull.  

As with so many forms of British wildlife, today’s hares are threatened by changing agricultural practice. Larger fields with a single cereal crop a year curtail hares’ year-round food supply while offering them diminished cover, and their forms – shallow depressions in the ground – offer limited shelter and, potentially, a degree of exposure and vulnerability. A survey in 2008 estimated current brown hare numbers in Britain in the region of 800,000, a figure which represents a consistent if gradual decline since the Sixties. Unlike rabbits, hares are resistant to myxomatosis and have suffered no equivalent cull.

During the mating season hares have boxing matches, standing on their hind legs. It is a sight that I would love to see. 

Hares At Play

The birds are gone to bed; the cows are still,
And sheep lie panting on each old mole-hill;
And underneath the willow’s gray-green bough -
Like toil a resting - lies the fallow plough.
The timid hares throw daylight's fears away
On the lane’s road, to dust and dance and play
Then dabble in the grain, by nought deterred,
To lick the dewfall from the barley’s beard,
Then out they sturt again and round the hill
Like happy thoughts - dance - squat - and loiter still
Till milking maidens in the early morn
Gingle their yokes and sturt them in the corn;
Through well known beaten paths each nimbling hare
Sturts quick as fear - and seeks its hidden lair.

John Clare

Thanks for reading. Adele

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Crack

 

This month, I have mostly been inspired by the poetry of Carolyn Kizer.  Semele Recycled inspired this piece.  I kept the river but chose a different goddess.

Tongue, amputated

Sentiments flash noisily across a crowded bed

black torrents crash

churn cracked ceramic frag

ments

lost limbs

branched bones

Run off the mill mingles with drops

returning from epiphanies both deep and high

Imagine submergence

Tongue, amputated

resting on the grassy bank

flaccid and over-ripe

runway veins drained

speckled cushion flat

Mute as the swan and half as remarkable

serene as Selene, gazing,

awash with borrowed blaze

Contradiction is knowledge

silence only a theory

Already I have said too much

always, I am saying too much

As usual, if you have any thoughts on how this poem can be improved, they will be gratefully accepted.  Thank you.

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Essence and Inspiration

An interview with Cath Nichols, extended from one previously conducted by Deborah Swift (novelist) at: www.deborahswift.co.uk

1. What is it about poetry that makes it essential to you?

Something about the reading of poems makes me go into a different space/time experience – whether that’s reading them in my head or hearing the poet read them out loud. It’s not usually the ‘story-telling’ space (which I think of as a kind of escapism, or learning, or forward momentum) that I get from reading prose. It’s more like meditation or a quality of attention. If prose is forward momentum, poetry is circular; it ripples out from the centre. Certainly when I’m writing poetry, too, there is a sense of ‘tardis space’ – time spent ‘in’ poetry is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!

2.Tell me about the themes that most excite you at the moment, or structures in poetry or prose that make your eyes light up.

I have been preoccupied with the sea for years and with various myths. Also hybrid people and characters: for example, mermaids, and over the last couple of years the Procne and Philomela, a myth where both women are turned into birds. I’ve noticed that I often get hooked on material that was someone else’s first. The hook is where my mind keeps going back to a thing that I disagree with strongly (such as Hans Christian Anderson’s use of the little mermaid and how she has to work to earn a place in heaven - yuk). It’s the gritty irritation than later develops into something, a percieved injustice in the older writing that needs re-writing for today (in my opinion). Philomela (the nightingale in various odes) had real appeal: why should she turn into a nightingale and sing a sweet sad song having been raped by her brother-in-law? It made me furious! So, I wrote a poem and later a play (set in the present and involving an Asian family in Manchester) to work out a different approach.

I am building up a novel now which is a response to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Again deep outrage that Imogen’s husband agrees to a bet to test his wife’s faithfulness. She is put at great risk; he believes she has been unfaithful and sends someone to kill her; and then at the end of the story they reunite to live happily ever after! Aargh! The gall of it. Of course, I realise in those days women had to put up with a great deal and possibly marriage was the best protection available, so you’d do all you could to make it work, and forgive all kinds of crap. But not now.
Investigating structures: now I’m doing longer works I am fascinated by links between poetry and prose or plays – it’s something about rhythm and alternation, I think. In prose it seems to be to do with suspending the revelation of plot and creating recurring motifs; and in a poem it’s to do with the tension in enjambment, and repetition of words or sounds.

3. You are interested in radio and the aural experience of words. How has this influenced your work?

It was a big part of my PhD research. I’d noticed that many poets write for radio as dramatists, docu-drama writers and sometimes as poets. I love Michael Symmons Roberts work (he used to be a BBC documentary producer and later Head of Religious Broadcasting before becoming a full-time poet and academic). Paul Farley and Simon Armitage too have done a lot. Way back you have Dylan Thomas and in fact almost every poet based in London in the forties did some work for radio as an actor, writer or producer. Samuel Beckett did some innovative stuff (he did the first really radiophonic play All that Fall – using sound in a distorted way for atmospheric effect). Joan Littlewood and Charles Parker valued working-class history and experience. With Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger they made the Radio Ballads series: this pretty much invented documentary without commentary – people were heard in their own voices for the first time, instead of transcribed interviews being read by actors! That followed on from the invention of new technologies that made recording equipment portable – writers and producers could get out and about.
Kathleen Jamie did a wonderful radio play in the 90s that had imagined characters from Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings talking about their lives since the great Whitsun train ride. Their stories were interleaved with Larkin reading the poem. You can listen to it in the British Library if you go to the sound archive there. All of it is just so inspiring.

I’ve done some local BBC radio short drama and poetry but I’m still trying to crack Radio 4 drama. New writers have to go via the Afternoon Play slot which is pretty pedestrian. Only the famous get asked to do docu-drama stuff, which would be more up my street. So, watch this space!

4. Which other writers have made a lasting impression on you and why?

For novels, Shani Mootoo’s The Cereus Blooms at Night. Fabulous, surprising novel set in the Caribbean with race, sexuality (as in queer as well as straight) and gender issues seamlessly woven through a great story set in the past and present.
Anne Carson, a Canadian poet and Classics professor who writes book-length poems or sequences. The Autobiography of Red (Red is a little ‘creature’ from a Greek myth alive in the present day), and Glass and Gods. The sequence where the narrator goes home to Mum after heartbreak, but re-investigates Emily Bronte and the moors, sums up a particular kind of sadness and detachment. It is sometimes shocking when it describes certain acts of desperation, but it’s so truthful as to how humans can be with each other. The Beauty of the Husband is another book-length poem of hers (subtitled ‘a fictional essay in 29 tangos’!). It won the T.S. Eliot Prize a few years ago). Carson also does translations of Greek drama and writes fantastic essays.

5. Tell me about your publications or scripts-in-progress.

Pamphlet, Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood, 2005). This is being re-issued soon by erbacce press (Driftwood having closed) with a group of new poems, ‘Distance’.
Collection, My Glamorous Assistant (Headland, 2007).
I’ve poems forthcoming in Poetry Wales and The Stinging Fly and, I found out last month that I’ll be in 2012’s Lung Jazz: Young Poets for Oxfam. I’m not that young, but the line was drawn at 40 years old at the time of sending in work last year.
I’ve a couple of plays doing the rounds at the moment (i.e. being sent to theatres and companies), so look out for them, or if you’re part of a theatre group you can request to read them. They all have very strong parts for women. Drowning Meirion Evans – set around 1915, Woolworths, the Lusitania and with lots of magical business. Birdie – the Philomela myth re-written for an Asian family in Manchester. And there’s Ada – a take on Phaedre where an older married woman falls for a young lad with dire consequences. I took inspiration from the Iris/ Peter Robinson affair in Northern Ireland (she was sixty and had an affair with a nineteen year old, yikes!), but also gave it a twist: she is ardently religious and finds out that the lad thinks he might be gay – so she’s trying to ‘help’ him be straight. It all takes place in a country on the brink of civil war, and Ada is married to the country’s president.

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