38 BULLETIN 196, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



bon (1841) says: "In all the Southern States, * * * their 

 presence is productive of a sort of jubilee among the gunners, and the 

 havoc made among them with bows and arrows, blowpipes, guns, and 

 traps of different sorts, is wonderful. Every gunner brings them home 

 by bagsful, and the markets are supplied with them at a very cheap 

 rate. Several persons may at this season stand round the foot of a 

 tree loaded with berries, and shoot the greater part of the day, so fast 

 do the flocks of Kobins succeed each other. They are then fat and 

 juicy, and afford excellent eating." 



Fall. — Of the behavior of robins during the late summer and 

 autumn William Brewster (1906) says: 



Soon after rearing their second broods of young — most of which are able to 

 shift for themselves before the middle of August — our Robins change not only 

 their haunts but their habits, also. Abandoning their diet of earthworms, and 

 assembling in flocks, they now range widely over the country in search of berries of 

 various kinds, on which they subsist almost wholly during the remainder of the 

 year. It is true that they revisit our city gardens in early September when the 

 rum cherries are ripe, and that even later in the year we occasionally see them 

 running about in the old familiar way over our lawns and flower-beds, but through- 

 out the autumn they spend most of their time in retired fields, pastures and 

 woodlands, or in swampy thickets bordering brooks and meadows. Most if not 

 all of our local-bred birds depart for the south before the close of October. In 

 November their places are taken by migrants from further north, which some- 

 times appear suddenly in immense flocks and, after literally flooding the country 

 for several successive days, pass on further to the southward. Robins are ordi- 

 narily scarcer in December than at any other season, and occasionally they are. 

 almost wholly absent during that month. 



Francis Beach White (1937), speaking of the "stragglers in the 

 woods" late in summer, says: "It is now that their habits undergo a 

 complete change, for these birds are now like different beings, shy, 

 furtive, wary, excitable. You may hear a rustling in the foliage, a 

 soft 'whut-whut', and all vanish unseen, or you may come on one that 

 assumes the motionless pose of a Hermit Thrush on a branch in a dim 

 thicket." 



There are days also in mid-September when a furor of excitement 

 seems to possess the flocks of robins in the woods. They are restless 

 and noisy, moving about high in the trees, and making long flights in 

 companies of half a dozen or more: a businesslike air of migration 

 pervades the gatherings. 



On September 4, 1931, Wendell Taber (MS.) saw robins in actual 

 migration. He was on the tableland on Mount Katahdin, Maine, at 

 an elevation of 4,300 feet in a dense fog when 24 robins flew past him, 

 near together, at close range in a southerly direction. He says 

 (MS.): "Visibility was limited to a few yards, and I have no doubt 

 that I saw only a small part of the flight. A deviation of a few miles 

 to either side would have avoided passing over the high range." 



