Though we're experiencing what the radio describes as a last cold spell before spring begins in earnest, I got a little omen of spring during my daily walk today. It wasn't my first robin of the year; that was a couple weeks ago. Rather, it was just under a hundred robins trotting about the same field, a little neighborhood baseball park. They were as evenly spread as you could possibly hope, given that they moved about a bit. They behaved like an ideal gas, each robin acting to keep maximum distance between itself , its neighbors, and the borders of the field.
They were all cocking their heads, listening intently for worms. Or so I've been told. Is that an old wives' tale, that they can hear worms crawling beneath the surface, and thus know where to peck? I don't question that robins' hearing can be sensitive enough to pick up a worm, but that it can pick out a crawling worm, which must make a good imitation of white noise, over the noise of nearby traffic, when tires and air currents make a good imitation of white noise, too.
Still, they must have been getting something, because every once in a while one would stop and peck, and bring a morsel up. Heaven knows if it was a worm; I can't see that clearly.
I stopped and watched them for several minutes, trying to determine if the robins over the sandy areas of the diamond were having any more luck than the robins in the grass. I tried to guess which were male and which female from the intensity of color on their breasts. I speculated on what robins do when summer comes; they are still around, but you don't see as many. Do they tend to move a bit farther north? Do they just hide in the darker spots, away from humans enjoying the summertime outdoors? Or do they just seem to be rarer because we see so much more wildlife that they don't stand out? I reminisced about the only year that I ever saw a robin before my mother. I was still walking a few miles a day to and between classes, rather than locked inside, and downstate, where it was a few degrees warmer.
And just as I reached this thought about how I rarely see many early robins, something spooked them, and they took off for the trees.